


Am and Was

by PoppyAlexander



Series: Bleed So Pretty: A Collection of Fight!lock Stories [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fight Club Fusion, Angry!John, Arguing, Blood, Blow Jobs, Character Death, Cutting, Discussion of prostitution, Drug Abuse, Drug Use, Drunkenness, Failed Encounter, Fight Club - Freeform, Fight Sex, Fight!lock, Fighting, Fighting Kink, Fragile!Sherlock, Frottage, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Gunplay, Hair-pulling, Hurt/Comfort, IV Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Intercrural Sex, Jealousy, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pinching, Punching, Riding Crops, Self-Harm, Spanking, Suicide, Texting, Triggers, Verbal Abuse, Violence, and it's not a kink, but really it's bring-Sherlock-down-a-peg kink, fightlock, it's just sad, something like prostitution kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-02-10 17:11:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2033202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoppyAlexander/pseuds/PoppyAlexander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meeting in an underground fight club has lead Sherlock Holmes and John Watson into an irrevocable downward spiral. Time to tap out.</p><p>AU-fight club</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. à Deux

**Author's Note:**

> This will be the final story in the Bleed So Pretty series of fight!lock stories.
> 
> As I have said since early days with this AU, nothing can end well. Heed the tags (new ones will be added with each chapter). This story is very dark and violent, and it does not end happily.
> 
> There is explicit description of alcohol and drug abuse, and later will come self-harm (cutting) and probably more descriptions of eating disorders. IF YOU MIGHT BE TRIGGERED to endanger yourself, please move on. You are so much more important than my smut. I mean it.
> 
> Later chapters will be more violent and have more graphic sexual content than this one. I will probably add one - two new chapters per week; be sure to subscribe above for updates or follow me on tumblr: fuckyeahfightlock
> 
> Italicized quote at the beginning of the chapter is from "Smiler with Knife" by Morrissey.

 

_See in me the side of you_  
 _that sometimes makes you jump with fright_  
 _Smiler with knife, it's your big night_  
  
 _Sinking bed, all warm and clean_  
 _Only sadness waits for me_  
 _Smiler with knife you're just in time_  
 _You're just in time. . ._

*

 

John could hear them shouting as soon as he pushed open the front door.

“. . .another broken promise, Sherlock! For fuck’s sake!”

“I never promised that. I never said ‘I promise.’ I wouldn’t make that kind of promise—“

“Not to me, you mean!”

“Not to anyone.”

John stomped up the stairs in hopes they would hear him and call a timeout. He’d sat on the fucking train from Berwick for an extra two and a half hours because of some accident ahead of them, near Darlington. He just wanted to have a couple of belts of Macallan, jerk off, and sleep. He rattled about a bit in the kitchen, making his presence known, but they kept on.

“I’ve never fucked around on you, Sherlock. I can’t—“

“Well, that was your own decision; I never asked—“

“Stop fucking defending your selfish behaviour! I’m sick of it, I swear I am. You’re always turning it back on me, like I’m crazy for being angry.”

John rolled his eyes, fetched down a glass from the cupboard beside the sink. It was too much to hope there’d be ice in the freezer so he ran the cold tap for a bit.

“All I have ever done is take care of you, Sherlock, and all you have ever done is just push, and _push_ , to see how much you can get away with.”

John tested the temperature of the water with his pinky, then let a bit splash into his glass.

“I don’t need to be taken care of. God I’m so tired of being talked to as if I were a child.”

“Then stop acting like one,” John muttered, in unison with Sherlock’s cop boyfriend—that DI Lestrade—who shouted it. John chuckled and fetched the half-empty bottle of Macallan from the back of the counter, twirled the cap anti-clockwise to open it. He concentrated hard on steadying his hand as he poured.

Sherlock again, smoothly crooning, manipulating, trying to gain the upper hand. “Greg. Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“I really think I’m done talking, at this point, Sherlock.”

“What do you mean?”

John shook his head, swirled the whisky with the water in his glass, gratefully drew from it.

“You well know what I mean. How many times have we had this same fight?”

John rolled a mouthful around on his tongue: woodsmoke, leather, vanilla. . .

“ _This_ isn’t a fight.”

John recognized the snide tone of Sherlock’s voice, could easily visualise the shifts in Sherlock’s posture that went with it. His cock stirred a bit and he swallowed hard, pulled again from the glass but didn’t take time to savour it, just gulped and grimaced at the burn.

“No, this is the _end_ of a fight, is what this is.”

“Don’t kid yourself your wife will take you back,” Sherlock volleyed.

“Fuck’s sake, Sherlock, why would you— Nevermind, just move aside and let me take my things. I’m not coming back here again.”

“Of course you’ll come back. You _need_ me.”

“I thought I did, but I was wrong.”

John poured more whisky: a double, no water.

“You need me to solve your cases so you can keep your job and pay your alimony. Pay your son’s school fees.”

“That’s enough, Sherlock. Don’t make it worse than it already is.”

Sherlock laughed, then—actually laughed—and John sympathetically braced for impact. Surely the cop boyfriend would smash Sherlock in the mouth, laughing at him like that.

A rumble, a rustle, a heavy thud. No telltale smack of skin on skin, though; no grunt of breath expelled suddenly as a head was thrown to the side. Another crash against Sherlock’s bedroom door, and a hollow shattering—probably a mug.

When he spoke again, Sherlock’s voice had shifted completely away from the arrogant, taunting sneer John knew well; instead it came out in a brittle whine. “Greg. . . _please_. . .”

“It’s _done_ , Sherlock,” the DI shouted, and there was a scuffling sound, a clothed body dragging along the door, then, unmistakably, a fist crashing against it. “ _Move!_ ”

“Greg. Don’t. . . Please don’t. . . I can’t—“ Sherlock was sobbing. Pathetic mess. Teenaged fucking girl, as ever.

The door came open and the haggard, silver-haired cop stomped out, clutching a rumpled bundle of clothes against his chest with one arm. The remains of the broken mug crunched under his feet. John kept his post by the kitchen counter, swirled the whisky in his glass.

“Best of luck, mate,” Lestrade snarled at John as he thundered toward the landing. “He lies. It’s _all_ he does.”

John raised his glass, tilted his head in sarcastic salute.

Lestrade beat down the stairs and the front door slammed. John could hear Sherlock sniff and sigh in his bedroom; he poured a third slug of whisky—hands steady at last, and the tight metal band around his head coming loose—then screwed the cap halfway on, slid the bottle back in its place.

Sherlock emerged from his bedroom, shirttails hanging out from his close-tailored trousers, bare feet incongruous beneath the off-kilter break of the cuffs.

“Not running after him this time, gorgeous?” John taunted.

Sherlock didn’t rise to it. “There’s no point.” Sherlock ran the cold tap, wet his fingertips, pressed them against his closed eyes. “He’ll probably go back to his wife.”

“Tourist, was he?” John offered his glass.

Sherlock took the glass, stuck his nose in it and inhaled, then handed it back to John without taking a sip. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did he hit you?” John did not sound concerned, merely curious.

“He never would,” Sherlock replied, monotone. “That’s not what he was. . .” He moved away from John toward the lounge, collapsed himself into his leather chair with one bare foot beneath him, one bony knee up in front of his sunken chest. “We weren’t like that. He never would.”

John drained the last of his whisky, shuffled to the lounge and flopped into the armchair opposite Sherlock, legs stretched out, head leaning into one palm.

“You wanted him to.” John said. “You were trying to goad him into it.”

“Fuck off, it’s not your affair.”

“Not yours anymore, either, apparently.”

Sherlock stared daggers at John through narrowed eyes.

“How was it, then?” John asked “If it wasn’t _like that_. I heard you once with him, in your room. It sounded very. . .”

“Shut up.”

“Romantic? Lot of crooning and sighing.” John’s smirk was crooked and cruel. “So very gentle and sweet. He must have really _loved_ you.”

Sherlock just went on staring at him, said nothing. Momentarily, John reached into his shirt pocket, tossed Sherlock an amber-tinted prescription bottle rattling with pills. Sherlock snatched it out of the air, rolled it between his palms without looking at it.

“Right. Not like you.”

“You can fuck right off with that, gorgeous.”

Sherlock unscrewed the cap, shook a few pills into his palm, set the bottle aside. “I suppose I owe you a confession, since we’ve already established I know everything about you.”

“Not everything.”

“As you like.” Sherlock shrugged. “You told me about your brother’s wife, and the circumstances of your discharge from the army—fairly personal things, I understand. As such, I suppose I can tell you something similarly. . .intimate. About me.” With one long-fingered hand, Sherlock slid open the drawer in the small table beside his chair and removed from within it a saucer and a heavy silver spoon, which he polished briefly with the tail of his shirt.

“When I was a child, my mother beat me relentlessly.” Sherlock’s tone was matter of fact, and he didn’t meet John’s eyes. He shifted himself in his chair to balance the saucer on his thigh, tipped the pills into it, and went to work crushing them to dust with the back of the spoon, pressing into the bowl of it with both thumbs. “Any minor infraction. Any perceived slight. Or for no reason at all other than that she hated her life, resented her husband, and was perplexed by her children. She hit me with anything at hand. There was a heavy, silver-handled hairbrush that had been in her family for some time, a special favourite of hers. Or my father’s belt. Once, her bedside lamp.”

As Sherlock wasn’t looking at him anyway, John let his gaze rest on Sherlock’s long fingers working to crush the tablets. There was a scab on one of his knuckles, a fading bruise around it. “It was a fussy thing, with a milk-glass shade and hanging crystals. They flew off and one cut my eye; there’s a mark there to this day, if you look closely; a freckle just at the edge of the iris.” Sherlock tapped one fingertip against the edge of his eye socket, shook some of the pill-dust off the back of the spoon. He nudged the pile of mostly-pulverised medication around on the saucer, then resumed pressing on it.

“We had a governess. Well, a series of them, actually—my father kept getting them pregnant.  The one I’m thinking of was with us when I was about twelve. She was young, twenty-two, maybe. Angular, Scandinavian face and long blonde hair tucked behind her ears. Probably beautiful. Certainly my father thought so.”

John hummed, let go a grunting laugh. He was soft around the edges so didn’t bother to hurry Sherlock along with his tale of extraordinary woe; Mumsy was _so mean_ to him.

“At any rate, there came a day when my mother beat me black-and-blue with a leather-bound book, and shoved me onto my bedroom floor, where I stayed, because I knew better than to get up.”

He’d finished with the pills; they were uniformly fine white powder in the saucer now, and he began pushing it this way and that with the spoon. Ultimately, he scooped up a bit, tapped it onto the plateau made by extending his thumb, tilting his wrist just so. He raised the back of his hand toward his face—something about the motion made John hold his breath—at the same time ducked his chin, and— _mmmmfffffuh!. . .mff. . . mfm!—_ snorted the lot of it up his nose. Sherlock tipped his head back, rubbed the base of his palm against his nostrils, still sniffling a bit. There was a beat, then two, then his head drifted forward to vertical as his eyes fluttered shut.

“Stunning,” John murmured.

“What’s this?” Sherlock slurred, then opened his eyes and shook his head.

“Nevermind.” John shifted a bit in his chair. A familiar heat pooled in his pelvis but with three doubles in him, a hard cock was probably more than he could hope for. _Fuck first, then drink, you idiot._ “Your mother threw you on the floor. . .?”

“Right.” Sherlock nodded, and his eyes glistened wetly. He went to work arranging another bump. “The governess—her name was Margit, I think. One of them was named Margit. Anyway—the governess came in and she put her hands on my face. She guided me to my bed and she petted me—fingers through my hair, stroking my cheeks, my arms—all the while cooing to me that I was good, I was sweet, she loved me, poor me, poor baby, she knew it hurt, she was sorry it hurt so much. . .And she kissed my cheek and my forehead. . .ultimately, I think it was her hand on the back of my neck that did it.”

Another little mound of the pill-dust in the hollow on the back of his hand. Another long, loud sniff. His head went back, the base of his palm rubbed his nose, and he let out a sigh that was nearly a groan. Sherlock’s head rolled slowly to the left before finding its right place again, upright on his long neck.

“That did what?” John prompted. He probably should have been ashamed to be so thoroughly aroused by Sherlock’s well-choreographed junkie behaviour, but of course, shame never entered into it. Still no signs of life in his trousers, though. Damn it, anyway.

“Well, as I said, I was twelve. And so, naturally, my body responded to her touch despite the fact I, by that time, already knew myself. And she kept on whispering, and soothing me with her pretty hands, and kissing my eyelids until—“

“You came in your shortpants, you posh little pervert,” John said, grinning wickedly, shaking an accusing finger in his direction.

Sherlock’s mouth curled up. “It was my tennis whites, actually.”

What was left of the pills—just a little bit, nothing like the first two bumps—went up Sherlock’s nose, and he wiped the saucer clean with two fingertips, licked the residue off them.

“So. . . _why_ are you telling me this?” John asked, vaguely remembered they’d started out talking about Sherlock’s boyfriend, the detective inspector.

“Well, you asked what it was like, with my. . .Well, I guess he’s my _former_ boyfriend, now.” Sherlock slid down in his chair, and his limbs stretched out to practically fill the room. “And. . .that’s how it was.”

“What, you’ve got a fetish for _poor you_ ’s? Congratulations; that’s a new one. I’ve not heard of that before.”

“Not a fetish; I can get off without it—obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“It’s only a _predilection_.” Sherlock struggled to enunciate the word, curling his tongue and concentrating on the shape of his lips.

“So—what?—you get in punch-ups at the club and then come home so he can stroke you and put plasters on your scratches?”

“He didn’t know about the club.” Sherlock shook his head. “He thought it was from working cases—that I got attacked, got in accidents.” Sherlock waved the back of his hand resignedly. “But it’s done. He’s finished with me because of your big mouth. You and your big. . .swinging dick.” Sherlock glared, but couldn’t hold it; he blinked but then couldn’t raise his eyelids again. After a long pause, he opened his eyes, pulled himself upright in the chair as if trying to lift himself out of his opiate haze. “You made trouble for me with my boyfriend. You owe me. You’re a doctor. . .take care of people. You could. . .” his voice broke and he looked away.

“I’m not your boyfriend, gorgeous,” John scoffed. “You and I are definitely not _like that_. There’s no name for what we are.”

Sherlock let go a bitter laugh. “But there is! Remember your psychiatry rotation, Doctor Watson? There is a name for it.”

“Yeah, what’s that?” John asked, sounding bored. Sherlock—when no one had a hard-on—was mostly tedious.

“ _Folie à deux_. Shared psychosis.  Each on his own perhaps gets by all right, but when they meet. . .” Sherlock brought his closed fists together until his fingertips touched, forcefully exploded them away from each other.

“I’m not psychotic.”

“Nor me.”

There was a quiet moment before they both started to laugh. Sherlock had slid so far down in his chair his head rested on its back, and he rumbled laughter at the ceiling. John leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, scrubbed his fingertips through his hair.

“You drink your whisky,” Sherlock offered at last, motioning vaguely toward John, “And I snort—what was it, anyway?”

“Oxycontin.”

“Anything I’m given,” Sherlock finished. “I’m an anorexic self-harmer; you had an affair with your brother’s wife. The fighting, of course.”

“Of course,” John echoed, smirking.

Sherlock looked for a moment as if he would go on, then his smiling face crumpled. “Beginning of the end, you said.”

John’s expression, too, became dour, and he squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

“I did say that. It’s true. _That_ is how we are, gorgeous.”

Sherlock bit his lip. His eyes began to close, his head lolling forward until his chin was nearly on his chest. John set his face back into his palm, elbow leaning on the arm of his chair, and he let the alcoholic haze pull at him until he sank fully down into it.


	2. Side Effects

_Press the blade against my skin_  
 _Never to make love again_  
 _Smiler with knife, it's all right_

  
*

“Wake up, gorgeous.”

John slapped Sherlock’s face. Not like he could, but not gently, either.

“Up,” he urged again. “Wake up so I can fuck you.”

Sherlock jerked upright in his chair and sucked in a gasp.

“My fucking head,” he moaned, spidering his long fingers through his hair as if trying to keep his skull from flying apart.

“Here,” John said casually, pressing Sherlock’s particular saucer and spoon at him. Three more pills jittered along the inner ring of the saucer. “I want to watch you.”

Sherlock looked at John through half-open eyes. “What time—“ he started. The flat was dark except for a sputtering, yellowish light over the kitchen sink. “Fuck off, it’s the middle of the night.”

“Yeah, and I’m awake and my prick’s hard so fucking get on with it and let me watch, and then I’ll bend you over that chair.” John gave the side of Sherlock’s head a smack with his open hand, then grabbed his chin. Sherlock tried to wrest his face away from John’s grip, balancing the saucer on his thigh. Sherlock rapped the heavy silver bowl of the spoon against the jutting knob of bone at John’s outer wrist and John shouted his pain, yanked the hand in toward his gut.

Once John had recovered, he grasped a handful of Sherlock’s hair and tugged hard. “Come on, gorgeous. You look so pretty when you’re huffing it up. Can’t wait to watch you fix up a needle.”

Sherlock swung his arm at John’s trying to loose his grip. “Fuck off!”

“Soon enough.” John’s closed-lipped half-smile was smug and did not get anywhere near his eyes.

“The fucking? Or the needle?” Sherlock challenged.

“Both.” John released his grip on Sherlock’s hair and sank into the facing armchair. He folded his arms across his chest, jerked a nod toward the saucer and the pills balanced on Sherlock’s wool-clad thigh. “G’wan then.”

Sherlock stared murderously, the spoon dangling between his finger and thumb. “You woke me in the middle of the night to watch me snort pills,” he droned in annoyed disbelief.

“And to fuck you,” John reminded. He’d sprung awake after a few hours dozing in the armchair—his liver had finished with the whisky and his bladder had demanded relief, though his swollen prick had made serving that particular master a bit of a challenge. He mused, “Though now I’m thinking I’d like you on your knees. Maybe I can fatten up your lip for you first.” He pressed the edge of his closed fist to his own lips in a way that might have looked like nervousness in some other circumstance.

“It’s too soon,” Sherlock muttered, and started to set the saucer on the table beside his chair. “I’m still—“

“Just one.”

“Have another drink, Doctor Watson.”

“Oh, believe me, I will. After.”

The two stared each other down for a long moment. Sherlock drew in the first half of a sigh, but didn’t let it go. He dropped two of the pills into the breast pocket of his shirt and pressed the back of the spoon against the remaining one.

“You cried when he was leaving.”

Sherlock’s shoulders jumped with an unvoiced, bitter laugh. The pill made a crystalline crunching sound as it shattered between the spoon and the saucer. “You couldn’t possibly care less about what makes me cry, so let’s just leave it aside, shall we.”

John shrugged, fell quiet again.

In time, John asked, “What’s that like?” Lips barely moving, voice just above a whisper.

“Once you break through the exterior coating there’s barely anything holding it together,” Sherlock replied, shifting the pile of pill-dust a bit and pressing down again, rolling the pad of his thumb in a wide circle inside the bowl of the spoon, rocking it in a wide arc.

“No,” John said quietly. He cleared his throat.

“What--?” Sherlock sounded truly puzzled. He guided the drug-powder over the lip of the spoon with his pinky. John sat forward to watch more closely. “Do you mean what’s _crying_ like?”

Sherlock arranged his wrist, back of his hand tipped away from him, thumb parallel to his chest, a vague crease appearing between the muscles of forefinger and thumb. He tipped the bump off the spoon onto his hand with practised accuracy.

John clarified. “Feelings.”

Sherlock turned his head away to avoid blowing the dust off his hand as he let out a snort.

“Horrid,” Sherlock said, and swiftly his nose met the back of his hand and he sniffed hard, his bottom lip quivering in the rush of breath between slightly-parted lips, helping things along. He pinched his nose to keep from sneezing, sniffed again as he withdrew his fingers. “I hate them.” His eyes fluttered shut and the lines in his forehead and at the corners of his mouth softened.

John didn’t reply, kept quiet as he watched Sherlock slacken: shoulders sliding down and then rounding, head drifting slowly to one side before Sherlock jerked it back upright only to have it start drifting again. His hands lay open in his lap, fingers curling. The spoon slipped from his grip and grazed down his thigh onto the seat of the chair. Sherlock sat melting and silent for nearly a minute before his eyes blinked open and he reached for the dropped spoon as if the momentary nod had not even happened, picking up where he left off. John found this oddly fascinating.

Sherlock edged the remaining bit of the crushed oxy onto the spoon, was about to tip it out onto the back of his hand.

“Wait.”

John went to his knees in the space between their two chairs, grabbed Sherlock’s gracefully turned wrist and rolled the bones in his tightly-gripping fist. Sherlock whined mildly in response, tried to pull his hand away. John didn’t let go, but offered the back of his own hand in place of Sherlock’s.

“Leave off,” Sherlock muttered.

“Go on, gorgeous.”

Sherlock attempted an eyeroll that his entire head followed.

“Oi.” John pinched the skin of Sherlock’s chest through his shirt.

Sherlock’s head jerked back close to center, and he arranged the bump on the back of John’s hand. John—still knelt in front of the chair, looking up into Sherlock’s eyes, which were heavy-lidded, darker than usual—muttered in a thick voice, “So before, when you were using. . .did you fuck for money?”

Sherlock steadied John’s forearm, snorted up the powder, finished by catching the meat of John’s hand between his teeth and biting down hard. John answered with a wide, roundhouse punch that landed high on Sherlock’s chest and sent him deeply back into his chair.

Sherlock’s words came out jerkily as he tried to fight against slurring them. “The _fuck_. . .do you. . . _care_?”

“Gets me hot thinking about you on your knees in some dark back room somewhere,” John said, and Sherlock licked the last bit of pill residue off the back of John’s hand. “Desperate. Eager to please.” John wiped the hand Sherlock had licked against the front of his too-tight, tailored shirt.

“Shhuddit,” Sherlock slurred.

John slapped Sherlock’s cheek soundly, the smack ringing out sharp and loud in the late-night quiet. “Don’t nod off on me, now,” he scolded.

“You wanted me to do it,” Sherlock complained, eyes closed but body somewhat more erect as he tried to gather himself.

John hummed something between agreement and annoyance. He stroked one hand up Sherlock’s thigh from knee to hip, slipped it across to the fly of Sherlock’s trousers and found his cock firm beneath the fine wool fabric. He looked questioningly into Sherlock’s half-closed eyes. One side of Sherlock’s mouth curled up. “Happy side effect. But I’ll never come.”

“Like I care whether _you_ come or not,” John said, with a _you-know-better_ expression glinting across his face.

John braced himself against Sherlock’s thighs as he pushed himself up to standing, then kicked Sherlock’s feet apart to make room, John’s shins against the front of the leather chair cushion. He went after his belt buckle, wrested open the button and zip.

“Lick those pretty lips, gorgeous,” John growled, low and gusty. Once he’d shifted his jeans and boxers down and freed himself, he slid one hand around his heavy cock and with the other reached for the crown of Sherlock’s head. He twisted his grip slightly in the mass of wild curls and started to pull Sherlock’s head closer. Sherlock swung one arm wildly—certainly not as hard as might have if he weren’t in an anodyne cloud—and it caught John’s upper arm but didn’t dissuade him.

John released his grip on his cock long enough to jab a fist hard against Sherlock’s cheekbone; Sherlock’s eyes went wide and filled with tears and he sucked in a loud gasp of shock.

“Settle down, now,” John scolded, wrapping his fingers around the base of his prick and pulling hard on Sherlock’s hair, urging him forward. “There’s work to be done.”

Sherlock whined. “I’m too. . .I can’t.”

“Soldier on,” John said simply, and tugged Sherlock’s head into a pleasing position. The drippy crown of his cock brushed against Sherlock’s slightly-open mouth and Sherlock’s tongue snaked out, traced a wet circle around his lips. “Mm,” John encouraged. “And mind the teeth.”

Sherlock slipped his open mouth onto the head of John’s cock, circled his tongue sloppily around it, and John groaned and shuddered, purposefully unlocked his knees to avoid passing out. Long-fingered hands gripped loosely at the fabric of John’s jeans, along his hips, and Sherlock didn’t need much persuading as he worked his lips and tongue down one side of John’s heavy length, then back toward the crown along the ridged underside; John kept his hand wound in Sherlock’s hair regardless, tugging and releasing against his scalp, causing just enough pain to keep Sherlock from getting lazy.

One of Sherlock’s hands moved from its place on John’s hip and he spit into his palm, then wrapped his cool fingers around John’s shaft; John sucked in a breath and rolled his head on his neck. He let his gaze drift down to Sherlock’s dark hair tangled around his fingers, shifted Sherlock’s head so the side of his face was visible in the dim: sharp edges of eye socket and jaw, hollowed divot of his cheek as he sucked John’s cock deep into his mouth, across his tongue, right down into his throat, god bless him. His closed eyelids were smooth and his lashes were wet with tears.

“Oh, good lad. . ” John praised, each syllable drawn out so he used up all his expelled breath on the three-word phrase. Sherlock’s hand stroked to make up the difference, though his chemically-enhanced soporific state allowed him to take John deeply inside without the pesky gag reflex asserting itself. John urged Sherlock’s head closer, and Sherlock swallowed hard around him—then again. . .and then again—and John fell forward slightly, curling around the coiling burn deep in his pelvis, bracing himself with his free hand on Sherlock’s shoulder.

He allowed Sherlock to back off a bit, get his breath.

“Would you try harder if I offered you money?” John asked sardonically. “Or, if I waved a cellophane packet in your face would you moan and finger your asshole for me? Put on a show?”

Sherlock let out a low sigh and tried to move away, but John’s grip was fast in his hair.

“Don’t get sensitive on me, now,” John said in a low voice. “Anyway. I want to fuck you so turn around and get ready.” He tossed Sherlock’s head a bit as he released it.

All at once, Sherlock roared forward and up, catching John’s jaw with his balled fist, sending him staggering back a few steps. Equilibrium still challenged, John stumbled back and sank into the overstuffed armchair.

“Oh, now you’re ready for a fight, are you?” John scoffed. Sherlock stood before him, breath heaving, gaze unsteady.

“Always,” Sherlock replied. “Get up.” He made a _c’mere_ motion with one hand. Within a few seconds, though, his eyelids slid down again and he started ever-so-slowly to lean to his left.

John eyed him up, head to foot and halfway up again, his gaze settling on the fullness pressing at Sherlock’s fly.

“Nevermind the punch-up, gorgeous. You’re in a cloud.” John leaned up to grasp Sherlock’s wrist. “Oh, and broken-hearted, too,” he added, in a mock-syrupy tone, even pouting out his lip. “You’re in no condition for a beating.” He drew Sherlock to him, made quick work of unfastening his trousers and pushing them down over the clothes-rack hips to pool around Sherlock’s ankles. The head of Sherlock’s prick was visible beneath his shirttails, dark pink and slick. John reached for it, wrapped his hand around the shaft, guiding Sherlock forward with his other hand, stroking and urging him ever closer. Sherlock let out a broken sigh and his whole body shuddered: knees weakening, hips pressing vaguely into John’s hand, quivering stomach and collapsing shoulders.

John persuaded Sherlock onto him, Sherlock’s knees to the outsides of John’s thighs, and John slid down toward the front edge of the chair. Obviously fighting to keep his eyes open, Sherlock leaned heavily until his arms folded behind John’s neck, elbows on the chair back, chest resting against John’s shoulder.

John’s hand against Sherlock’s cheek then, sliding against his pale lips. After a long moment waiting for Sherlock to respond, John craned his neck, mouth against Sherlock’s ear and he growled, “Lick it for me.” Dutifully, a moist tongue snaked out and stroked his palm. John groaned, moved to wrap his spit-slicked hand around both their cocks, sliding and twisting, shifting Sherlock’s length against his own, rutting upward against it, into his palm. John swirled his palm up and over, catching precum to help slick them. Sherlock huffed a breath that stirred the hair on the back of John’s neck, hummed groggily; about every third stroke of John’s hand reminded him to move, and he lazily rolled his hips, always out of sync.

John’s free hand gripped hard at the crease between Sherlock’s hip and thigh, now and then digging in his fingertips, making Sherlock catch his breath. He slid his palm around and down, cupping Sherlock’s ass, letting his fingers sink into the cleft, and Sherlock’s voice became needy as he moaned against the top of John’s head. John rocked his hand to lift and release Sherlock's buttocks, urging him up and back, sliding their slippery cocks against each other in the firm coil of his other fist.

Sherlock lifted one hand off the back of the chair, and his long fingers brushed down John’s neck, swept aside the edge of his shirt to seek out a pliant fold of flesh at the base of John’s throat. He pinched hard. John grunted his pain, and his hips hitched, and his cock softened.

“Fuck!” A frustrated scramble and he was shoving Sherlock backwards off his lap, going with both hands for his suddenly lazy prick, trying to coax his erection back to life. _Fuck first, then drink! You fucking! Idiot!_ God, he knew better. Meantime, Sherlock sat on the floor with his back against his leather chair, firm cock still making itself known beneath the hem of his shirt, shoulders rounding, head lolling to one side and then forward. A trace of a smile bent his lips but otherwise he looked for all the world as if he were asleep.

Abandoning his efforts to firm himself up, John did up his trousers and gave Sherlock’s leg a swift, heavy kick, the toe of his shoe landing in the tender divot just beside his kneecap. Sherlock flinched mildly but immediately settled back into a stupor.

“’S’all right,” John muttered. “You’ll owe me one, eh?” He exhaled hard through his nose, watched Sherlock nodding out for another few seconds. He left Sherlock half-naked and semi-conscious on the floor, stopped for a pull off the whisky bottle on his way to his bedroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Italicized quote at the beginning of the chapter is from "Smiler with Knife," by Morrissey.


	3. Alight, Alight

_Surrendered will, I am before you_   
_I am sick to death of life_   
_Smiler with knife: alight_   
_Alight_   
  
_If such things weren't meant to be_   
_Then they would never come to me_   
_Smiler, oh, don't worry so_

 

*

_The Blog of John H Watson:_

_Will soon be bidding goodbye to good ol’ Berwick-Upon-Tweed. London calling! Be sure to get your splinters pulled and warts frozen in the next few weeks, villagers, because Doctor Watson’s days are numbered._

John was late to arrive Monday morning and wondered if he’d swished enough mouthwash (swallowed some, why not) to cover the smell of the previous night’s fifth, most of it consumed on what he’d by then decided was his final train journey to his bedsit in Berwick. Sweet-stinking booze-breath or no, it was probably seeping out his pores by now, anyway. He’d woken up still drunk, felt steadier by the time he’d slid his letter of resignation under the clinic director’s door, but it was an uphill slog not to watch the clock all day, until he could at last get a few more belts in him.

His life insurance was arranged; his brothers’ kids would be set up. Even if the insurance didn’t pay out (alcoholic suicide would be hard to prove, but not impossible), he’d set up some accounts—small investments, all he could afford, but the kids were young and had years to go before they’d need to tap into them; it’d be worth something by then—and that would get them started. All apologies to the widow Watson, but she would probably have to break down and get a job. Wouldn’t kill her.

Eight more work days, less than two weeks, and he’d be back in London to live out the remainder of his days. If they didn’t fire him first. He promised himself he would try his damnedest to keep it together.

_The blog of John H Watson_

_Did I ever tell about my family? My mother was Amelia—everyone called her Amy—and she was. . .I don’t know if my father beat all the kindness out of her, or if she was always that way, but I will say this for her: she was the most skillful, gifted liar god has ever made. My father, Henry, was an angry drunk who never missed a chance to put a mark on her. He said cruel things to weak people in order to raise himself up in his own esteem. My brother Harry was desperate to please, the peacemaker, and he would have made himself my mother’s pet except that she couldn’t be bothered to stroke him. And then there was me. I turned invisible. Whether I chose it or they put it on me, I’m not sure. But when everything around you is chaos, you shut down or go mad._

_I am a hollow man. I shape my face in acceptable ways but I have never felt a single thing in my life but numb. I became a doctor hoping it would make me care. I went to war hoping it would kill me. I drank hoping to forget myself. I have never hit a woman, only because once I got the itch to, I made damn sure they found me cheating so they’d break up with me. My idiot brother smashed his car into a tree without a thought for his kids and I got sober hoping to make amends on his behalf. I tried to rescue them—I even tried to love them—but the closest I ever got was just cleaning up after my brother, patching up his mistakes. Now I get into fistfights and have dangerous sex with strangers just hoping I can fucking feel something. I’m my father’s son, an angry drunk who says cruel things to weak people, and why? If I knew how to feel anything, I would only feel disgusted with myself and contemptuous of everyone else. It’s enough. I’m tired. Enough._

Four clinic days and John muddled through, though he cancelled afternoon hours on the Thursday because he’d had a few at lunch and didn’t trust himself. The receptionist was beginning to get that look in her eyes he’d seen other people wearing in the past, and she asked him more than once a day if he was all right, getting along OK, did he need anything, anything at all? John hoped to get out of the clinic before she cornered him with knitted brow and a list of his shortcomings that all pointed to her conclusion that he had a problem, and there was help, and she would support him however she could—they all would—she knew he had an illness but he could get well. He’d heard all this before, and once he’d even swallowed it. No more. This time he was really done.

Saturday night found him in the pub, at a table in the corner with a plate of uneaten lamb in front of him, nursing his fourth cheap whisky in a bit over two hours. There was a young couple nearby; the girl had on just _piles_ of make-up, John could tell even from a distance, and the sclera of one eye was dark red where it should have been white. The fella had his back to John; he had NF tattoos on one forearm, and his face nearly down in his plate.

John was nearing the bottom of his glass; he tipped a couple of ice cubes into his mouth, sucked the last of the whisky off them, crunched them absentmindedly. The National Front enthusiast made an awkward, sudden shift in his seat, _probably adjusting his bollocks_ , John figured, _to remind himself what a big man he is_. The girl with him flinched, dropped her fork with a clatter onto her plate, and it continued on to the floor. John set down his glass, straightened his back as he pushed the wobbly little table slightly away from him. He squinted a bit, but found it did nothing to intensify his alcohol-blurred focus.

The words were unintelligible from where John sat, but the guy’s tone was gruff, like a barking dog, and the girl’s blood-filled eye shimmered with tears. She looked pleadingly across at her date, and he barked at her again. The girl leaned slightly sideways, presumably to pick up her dropped fork, and the fella’s hand shot out, catching her hard by the wrist, and twisting. John could read the girl’s lips as she pleaded, “Please don’t do this now.”

The inside of John’s head felt hot. His fists were clenched, knuckles-down atop the table.

The girl straightened up, looked at her plate and hesitantly picked at her meal with her fingers, lifted a drippy bit to her mouth. The guy nodded and snorted a cruel laugh. A tear rolled down the girl’s cheek, dripped off her chin.

John’s teeth ground together. Now that her make-up was running, the girl’s black eye was more obvious. There was a dark ring extending from the inner corner, where the blood had pooled in the hollow of her eye socket.

“Doctor Watson! How nice to see you!”

A patient he’d been seeing twice a month as she approached her pregnancy due date was suddenly standing beside his little table, tugging a bored-looking professor-type along by the sleeve of his jumper.

“Ah, yes, hello,” John managed, keeping things brief to avoid slurring.

“My husband, Jason,” she said, and motioned. “This is Doctor Watson.” The man extended his hand toward John for a shake. From the corner of his eye, John caught sight of the National Front fella shoving his girlfriend’s shoulder, across the table.

“Yeh, excuse me a minute,” John muttered to his patient and her husband, simultaneously rising to his feet. He strode the short distance to the couple’s table and stood facing the guy, who it turned out also had a tattoo on his neck, of the English flag. “Big man, I see,” John said in a dangerous tone.

“Fuck off, who are you?”

“Who am I,” John droned, gaze never shifting away, shoulders straight, chest high.

“Yeh, who—“

John was on him, left, right, left: sternum, chin, right eye. The pub erupted; the expectant woman shrieked at her husband to do something and he reached for his phone, didn’t even shield his pregnant wife from nearby violence. The girlfriend with the black eye screamed, “ _No no no!_ ” into her hands. John kept _forward_ , the advantage of being on his feet—while the guy sat—nearly erased by the fact he was more drunk than he’d realised. His punches were powerful but often missed their mark. He aimed for the guy’s eye with a hammering left, over and over, his right hand against the guy’s throat, pushing backward. He wanted to fracture his eye socket; swell up the tissue all around it; split the lid; make it bleed. John wanted that abusive piece of shit to be wearing that black eye for a month. Two.

All at once, hands on John’s shoulders from behind, yanking him back.

“Doctor Watson, what are you thinking?!”

Everyone knew the fucking village doctor. Now it was a mad scene as a cop rolled in, and John was panting, sweating, wanted to spit in the fella’s face, show him what he was worth. The girlfriend, damn her, was wrapping ice in a napkin and holding it to her date’s cheekbone. Blood trickled from his nostril.

John shook off the bartender who’d pulled him back, stormed out past the cop without a word, ducked around the corner and half-jogged, half-staggered down the pavement toward his gnarly bedsit. If the cop wanted to arrest him, every other busybody in that fucking place would know exactly where John could be found. Right now, though, he needed a fucking drink.

*

The stranger eyes up the riding crop critically, a shimmy of the wrist sends a slight ripple up its length to the flat, square leather tongue at its tip. Sherlock has just snorted two of the pills John left him (well ahead of schedule), and so the volume has been partially turned down on his racing mind: that situation in Hong Kong (again, why again?), the final decline and death of Paganini, a list of necessary ingredients for an experiment he will likely never do, Greg’s grey socks, Greg drinking beer from cans, Greg laughing at reruns of TV comedies. It’s all still there, slightly quieter, but it is unrelenting and always so loud. The stranger with the crop will (with luck and encouragement and a vague promise of remuneration) lower the volume even more.  Sherlock may even sleep tonight.

“Safe word?” The stranger extends a hand and Sherlock takes it, allows himself to be guided to the coffee table; he collapses to his knees at one end.

The several seconds that have elapsed were necessary for Sherlock to process the question, lift an answer from an ornately carved wooden chest in a particularly dim-lit room in the far back of his mind, drag it down the marble floor of a frigid corridor and out into the world.

“Mmmm. . .” he hums, and his head nods deeply forward. The stranger grips Sherlock by the chin, raises his face.  Sherlock forces his eyes open. “Mmm. . .marmalade.” He has just made it up; should the time come when he feels he needs to escape, it would be miraculous for him to remember. This is how he always arranges it. The stranger’s quick smile is genuine, but all at once the face deforms cruelly and the game is on. Sherlock can see the dark thunderhead in the distance, the rolling black cloud that will cover the sky of his racing mind. He can hear his sludgy, polluted blood slogging through his veins.

The stranger disturbs Sherlock’s brief reverie, offering a throw pillow for Sherlock to place beneath him, possibly to rut against, but Sherlock shakes his head and takes his position: belly down on the coffee table, head turned to press his cheek against its slick, cool surface. He unfastens his trousers and lets them fall, and the stranger shames him for already being hard (opiate-induced erection, nothing like what he is capable of, but there’s time). The leather tongue of the crop dips beneath the hem of his shirt and arranges it higher on his back, exposing him completely, then strokes down over each of his buttocks, lightly trailing, teasing. It traces along the cleft, dips low enough to brush his balls, then withdraws.

The stranger is stronger than he would have predicted and the licks come quick, rhythmic, stinging, at least a dozen—Sherlock loses count at seven—and Sherlock’s eyes fill with tears and his lips part to let go gasping shocks of breath.

“Aren’t you ashamed of what you’ve done?” the stranger demands, rhetorically. “Dirty, naughty boy. I’ll have you so welted up you won’t sit for a week.” The crop comes down twice more and Sherlock huffs but doesn’t give voice to it. “You’re disgraceful.”

_Sherlock has counted the pills, sorted them, divided them into pairs and trios, a few singles for a top-up in emergencies. He knows precisely when they will run out. After that, the needles and the glass bottle of morphine. He is trying not to hurry, but it is very difficult._

_Met potential clients all morning. Solved them all on the spot but didn’t share conclusions, only told them they were stupid or boring or (in one case) too ugly to look at for one more second—he does not work for free. All his money is accounted for. He knows precisely when it will run out. By the time it does, he will no longer have a use for it._

**_Anything for me, Detective Inspector? –SH_ **

**_I told you it’s done, Sherlock. Stop texting me._ **

**_Come over and fuck me, then. I promise I won’t even talk. If I’m not talking, I’m not lying. –SH_ **

**_You’d find a way. Stop now. I don’t want to have to change my number._ **

_The phone clatters against the kitchen wall before landing in the sink. He is sprawled low in his expensive leather chair (if he outlasts the money, he knows a midcentury-furniture collector in Chelsea who will buy it), and he slides down even further, turns his head, inhales the erotic, chemical-laden scent of it._

The stranger rains down another barrage of blows, not as hard as the first but more painful as they are landing across the burning, tender stripes of red already criss-crossing his buttocks. Sherlock’s hips jump and wriggle forward, seeking escape, but all it accomplishes is to press his cock uncomfortably against the table’s over-sharp edge. He is grunting out his pain now, with every lash. A pause, and the stranger drags a feathery, curlicue trail over and across and around his buttocks, the backs of his thighs.

There is a distinctive “Tsk-tsk,” from the stranger that Sherlock’s prick responds to. His mind is quieting, all its noise drowning in pure sensation: the warm, sluggish thrum of the painkillers oozing through every muscle, every vein, placing a layer of cotton batting beneath his skin; the sting and burn of the smacks across the tender flesh of his thighs and his well-abused backside. The condensation forming between his cheek and the smooth tabletop. The ache of his knees against the floor. The wetness on his face as the tears stream over his nose, drip into a pool near his eye. The sweat beading in his hairline.

 The stranger shames him again, in a voice filtered through Sherlock’s narcotic haze, the string of words befuddling, disjointed. “Filthy. . . _bad boy_. . .should punish. . . _dirty cock_. . .how dare you. . . _so very, very naughty_.” There are other words in between but he cannot make them out. He catches his bottom lip between his teeth. All at once, the stranger pinches the top of Sherlock’s ear between thumb and forefinger, pulls, twists. “ _Shame!”_ Sherlock would come if he were capable; the drug misdirects all his neural transmissions and all he can do is gasp harshly against the pain. It is exquisite.

_Sherlock spends a long time in front of the mirror, the tall one he keeps on the inside of the cupboard door with his dressing gowns hanging in front of it, because the pull of it is too strong. It is too cruel and too honest and there is some glamour on it which makes him appear at once beautiful and grotesque, and he has lost hours in it, mornings, afternoon. . .once a whole night. He drops his pyjama bottoms and toes them aside, lifts and bunches and unfolds the white undershirt (John Watson’s) until it is up and over his head and gone. He combs his fingertips through his hair, carefully arranges it across his forehead. He moistens his lips, parts them, and there is the pink tip of his tongue beckoning, and then hiding. What a tease._

_There are scars to be mapped, counted, traced, measured against his forefinger. Thin, white whispers; round purple confessions; ropy pink-red mistakes daring the watcher to ask, Did that hurt? Of course it fucking hurt. That is the point of it. Of all of it. If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not loud enough to drown out the droning, buzzing, glass-shattering, scream-madness of his tornado-mind._

_His muscles beneath taut skin are defined, pleasingly hard to the touch. Trapezius, bicep, pectoral, abdominal oblique, quadriceps. There are veins standing out against them like tangles of purple yarn. A few of them were ruined, he knows they were, but he wonders if they are better now. Others are now so visibly tempting he for quite a while considers skipping ahead._

**_When will you be back? –SH_ **

**_I should never go back there._ **

**_Yes, but when? –SH_ **

**_Friday week. Fights Thursday night. The only thing I’ll miss about ol Berwick._ **

_Eventually, he dresses, then paces for an hour, maybe longer, until Mrs Hudson appears in the doorway and offers to fix him a cup of tea (so he will sit down, stop walking above her head). Her mouth pinches together in a new way and Sherlock persuades her out the door, down the stairs, with false smiles, false promises. He lies on his bed with one ankle over the other. Pushed far back in the narrow, top drawer of the chest he knows there is something of Greg’s which he put there long ago, takes it out when he needs to. He won’t take it out now. Probably soon._

**_That series of sex assaults last July. Trees along that street had notices tacked to them, that they were to be taken down.—SH_ **

**_We’re not doing this either. Sherlock do you not understand what has happened here? Do you really not?_ **

**_Let me help. Through channels. Assign a DS to mediate.—SH_ **

**_I don’t want to see your face, hear your voice, smell your sodding aftershave._ **

**_What do I not understand?—SH_ **

**_Where do I bloody start._ **

_Sherlock must find a distraction. A distraction every day until John Watson returns. He goes to the bathroom, shakes pills into his hand, takes up his seat in his chair (he put Greg in it and knelt between his knees; Greg bent him over it; many men have bent him over it; he bent John Watson over it). He crushes the pills, sets his phone on the arm of the chair and he scrolls the map of local prospects._

The stranger’s feet are planted slightly apart, firm, steady, and the licks from the crop are unrelenting. Sherlock is keening now, eyes screwed shut, prick aching uselessly, but his mind is a beautiful expanse of grey-black cloud and nearly nothing else--only what his body registers, which is agony, which is better than the alternative.

“Bad,” the stranger drones, then strikes. “Bad!” Another stinging slap. “ _Bad!_ ” A quick lash, a sound that cracks the air. The stranger pants now with the effort. Another rapid-fire series of licks and the crop is dropped to the floor. The stranger’s face close to Sherlock’s face, breath shifting Sherlock’s sweat-dampened fringe. “You disgust me. You’re shameful.” Sherlock’s eyes remain closed. He nods slightly, cheek sliding easily through pooled sweat and tears between his face and the tabletop.

A moderately forceful slap on his face then; a different tone of voice. “Money.”

Sherlock moans.

“You said there’d be money.”

Sherlock almost laughs. Of course he hasn’t got money. It’s all been accounted for.

“Piece of shit,” the stranger mutters, and Sherlock quarter-opens his eyes when he hears stomping, rummaging, stomping. John Watson was right: one of these times your anonymous hook-up is going to rob you blind. Sherlock snorts a weak laugh. His knees are screaming for relief; he has been kneeling on them forever, but he knows shifting position—fuck, pulling up his trousers—is going to be at least as torturous, so he will withstand this particular discomfort for just a bit longer.

The stranger appears to realise there is nothing in the flat worth stealing, goes into the bathroom, opens the medicine chest. Sherlock cannot summon any outrage. Stomping now to where Sherlock is still splayed, exposed, the stranger squats down behind him, goes into his trousers pockets, fetches out his money clip, which holds not even enough cash for a taxi ride to the Yard. Away the stack of folded notes goes with the stranger. Sherlock hears pills rattling, too, in the stranger's hand--no--pocket. The stranger is gone. Sherlock has just lost half a week’s worth.

New calculations will be required. In the interim, Sherlock shifts awkwardly, with gasps and groans, from the coffee table to the sofa, lying on his side with his well-whipped backside just off the edge. And so now, at last—thank you stranger; thank you opiate painkillers; thank you bright, agonizing lashes; thank you words that trigger full-body memories of anything other than the endless torment of his racing brain—Sherlock sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> italicized quote at the beginning of each chapter is from "Smiler with Knife" by Morrissey
> 
> Subscribe above for updates.


	4. Not the Same

*

  
_Slam in one shot’s gentle pain_   
_Someone calling out my name_   
_Sex and love are not the same_   
_Are not the same_

  
*

John’s entire concentration was on steadying his hands (yet he was failing). Sour stomach; throbbing head; nothing new. Last fight night in Berwick, and now it had been 17 hours since his last drink. They’d have bounced him if he’d shown up drunk, but the way he felt now made him wonder if he wouldn’t have been better off just heading for the pub and hoping for a brawl. At least then his head wouldn’t be hammering.

It was early, just after nine, and the men were filtering in, signing up for fights. No one really talked—no point in small-talking a guy you might later be expected to beat senseless. Better to keep a respectful distance.

A familiar silhouette haloed by a fierce LED light in the entrance, and John’s stomach pinched and he swallowed back bile.  Long hands scribbling initials on the list hung by the door. For no reason John could have enunciated, he had an urge to run. But now here drifted the silhouette, too close for comfort, and planted its long feet beside John’s.

“The fuck are you doing here?”

“Slumming.” Sherlock’s voice oozed acid. “Since you’re coming back to London I figured this for my last opportunity. Shall we dance?”

“Not a chance, gorgeous,” John huffed.

Sherlock affected disappointment. His limbs twitched at irregular intervals and his jaw was clenched, flexing, teeth grinding. . .clearly he was on something.

“Don’t tell me you’re calling off our engagement, Doctor Watson.” He smiled weirdly. “After you’ve spoiled me for anyone else.”

“If I fight you, I think I’m likely to kill you.”

Sherlock’s voice dropped a half-step, and he droned, “And I think I’m likely to thank you for it.” He violently wrung his hands. “Bit late to worry, isn’t it?”

John shrugged. God, his head.

“You’re trembling, Doctor Watson.” Sherlock slid a hand into his coat, and when he withdrew it, the fingers were wrapped around a fifth. “Steady your nerves?”

“Fuck off with that,” John snarled, though his mouth watered and his eyes stung. “What are you on, by the way? You’re acting _properly_ tweaky.”

Sherlock returned the bottle to its place, and this time—nothing up my sleeve, presto!—there were a few pills (pastel, like pretty candy for children, which, when you really think about it, it was) between his fingertips.

“ _Ecsssss-ta-syyyy_ ,” Sherlock hissed, his eyes widening giddily. “I think there’s amphetamine in it, too, you’re right—speedy.” He rolled one onto his tongue with the pad of his thumb, and the tongue stayed out, and his head dipped toward John, and his eyebrows went up questioningly. Under a second and John was decided, and his hand went to the back of Sherlock’s neck to steady him (to claim him), and he opened his mouth and their tongues pressed together (Sherlock’s curled, extended, chased), and John bit down on the pill just until it broke, and swallowed.

“I need more, by the way,” Sherlock said then.

“I left you enough to kill an elephant.”

“A friend I’d never met came over for tea and petty theft.”

The night’s ringman was calling out fighters’ pseudonyms and men shifted toward the center of the room, surrounding a ring described with a line of sand.

John shook his finger, eyes rolling. “Warned you about the hook-ups, gorgeous.”

“I’m lost without you.” Sherlock rolled his shoulders, tangled up his fingers into a broken-steepled church. “Got your prescription pad, I imagine,” Sherlock ventured, and the tempo of his words increased, the more of them he strung together. “Back at your flat. Love to see it by the way, home-of-the-village-doctor-I’msureit’s _charming_.”

“I quit my job.”

“Right. But your prescription pad,” Sherlock prompted, and rubbed his hands together as if warming them.

“Jesus, stop fidgeting. Fuck’s sake. How many of those did you take?”

Sherlock’s fingers unfurled in a dismissive wave that could have indicated two, three, four, a handful, or “nevermind.” John said nothing, and Sherlock made no move to stop him as he reached inside Sherlock’s coat and fished out the bottle from an interior pocket. He slid it into his own jacket.

They watched a couple of quick bouts—one tap-out, one knockout—then Sherlock’s initials were called and he jitterbugged out of his coat and shirt in a flash, toed off his shoes, peeled off his socks and flung them into the shadows. John squinted at Sherlock as he jigged into the ring, pulling on his fingers to crack the knuckles, shaking his head jerkily as if to flick his fringe aside but as usual it settled where it wanted to, regardless. His eyes practically rolled, his jaw worked  constantly.

Sherlock’s opponent was a seaside-town ripoff of a South London chav—his track pants were knockoffs of knockoffs, haircut all wrong, thick chain around his neck nothing better than gold-plated tin. That said, he was bleeding gorgeous. Blonde but with huge, wet-warm brown eyes. Young man’s physique: pumped-up chest; long, sensuously curving biceps; concave abdomen. Miles tall—even taller than Sherlock. John could see in Sherlock’s eyes the same sort of weak-kneed hunger he was sure registered in his own.

The ring man raised his hand, chopped it down through the air with a lingering cry of “Fight!”

The kid squared up, loped anti-clockwise around Sherlock with a gangster-esque, leaning shuffle. Sherlock’s eyes narrowed momentarily, and he rocked his head on his neck—left, right, left—then in a movement so quick the kid had not a chance of reacting to deflect or avoid it, Sherlock grabbed both his wrists, yanked him forward and down into a vicious headbutt, and the kid crumpled to the floor. The ring-man raised Sherlock’s hand and the crowd cheered him.

Another bout, a bit longer, but with a lot of grappling, which made it dull to watch. Sherlock slid his bare feet into his shoes, took a ludicrously long time buttoning his shirt, his fingers lingeringly and lovingly caressing the fabric of the button placket as he went. John watched him, rolling his eyes, though there was that bit at the back of his brain which could all-too-clearly conjure a five-sense image of bunching Sherlock’s shirt-front in his fist, yanking him close, manhandling him through those overpriced trousers, biting him hard on the neck and jaw until he whined or hit back. John let the thought roll through like a passing train, watched it go, got back to the business at hand.

Because now John’s fight was being called. He shed his jacket, jumper, and vest, slipped out of his shoes, tucked his socks into them and set the lot of it off away from the gathered crowd, on the least-damp spot he could find on the floor. He glanced at his shaking hands, then away, toward the ceiling. He clenched his fists.

His opponent looked to be an even match—bloke in his thirties, neither rough-looking nor puny, bland and clean-shaven face, unremarkable hair cut, average size—but John struggled to get his head in the game. He was thinking about the bottle in his jacket, about fucking Sherlock on his creaky bed back at his tiny flat (make him moan and shout, give the junkie hooker across the hall some of her own medicine), about being back in London by morning, and about what being back in London meant. He cut off this line of thought before it went much farther, in case it wandered off as far as, _It’s not too late to change this_. He didn’t want it to change. He wanted it to end.

The ring-man raised his arm, brought it down. “Fight!”

John stepped forward, swung, connected. His opponent’s head snapped back when John’s fist caught him on the chin—not where John had been aiming. Another half-step, and John threw two jabs—left, right—against the bloke’s middle. A hand around his wrist yanked him stumbling forward, and John caught quick sight of Sherlock out the corner of his eye. A half-second’s worth of distraction meant he wound up in a headlock, and even as he clawed at the opponent’s arm around his neck, he was thinking that Sherlock’s mouth was useless to him—that clenching jaw, those grinding teeth—and while that was a pity and a waste, there was still plenty he could be good for, face down and arse-up. John was starting to feel the effects of the speedy x: slightly giddy, headachey, like the world was slowing down. The opponent’s grip was slipping.  John tapped out.

Quickly gathering his things and re-dressing himself, John muttered. “You have a plan, I suppose?”

“Pack your bag. Late train back to the real world. Don’t forget your prescription pad.”

John shrugged on his jacket, cracked open the bottle, and took a long swallow from it. He grimaced, scrubbed his fingers and thumb over his lips. “Come on then.”

*

In John’s bedsit, on his never-changed but always-militarily-made-up sheets, and Sherlock’s long feet were riding John’s shoulders as he worked his whisky-warmed mouth in the cleft of Sherlock’s ass. His keys still dangled from the lock on the outside of the door. Sherlock had shoved him into the flat, slammed the door, dropped his coat on the floor, and they’d wrestled and punched and slapped their way across the room, reeking of chemicals and fight-sweat and drink and angry, hungry, desperate _want_. Sherlock had bitten John’s lower lip until they both tasted blood, won himself an uppercut below the ribs for his trouble. John had shoved him onto the bed, hooked his steadying hands behind Sherlock’s knees and thrust his thighs up and apart, exposing the mottled asterisk of his asshole, and John went at it fervently with open lips and gyrating tongue, humming and moaning, pinching and slapping Sherlock’s thighs and buttocks and making Sherlock mewl and sigh and curse him.

John drew himself up, shambled around the bed to the nightstand. “Turn over,” he ordered. He went into the night-table drawer, nudged aside an empty flask, a broken wristwatch, a paperback book about murderers. Sherlock, still rolling out of his head on the speedy two or three or five or nevermind-how-many pills he’d taken earlier in the night, let go a strange, languid sort of giggle and obeyed the command, stretching his legs forever, then slow-motion-turning from his back onto his belly.

“All alone, Doctor Watson?” he slurred into the sheets.

John had fished out the bottle of lube from the drawer and was slicking up his heavy cock with quick efficiency. “What are you on about?” he muttered, with something like disgust creeping in at the edges.

“There’s only you on the blankets—your smell. Burberry London and bar soap and Boots’-own shampoo,” Sherlock replied. He was nuzzling his face into the bedclothes like a catnip-drunk kitten.

“Shut up.”

John kneeled on the bed beside Sherlock, pressed hard on his thighs to indicate Sherlock should hold them tight together. Sherlock crossed his slim ankles, which dangled off the edge of the mattress. A quick, cold drizzle, then John’s fingers and palm working the slippery stuff up and down the cleft of Sherlock’s ass, and down between his thighs. John straddled him, knees to either side of his hips, and tested the way for his cock between Sherlock’s buttocks, pressing down with his palms on each side and crisscrossing his thumbs over the gap as his prick slid slowly forward, then dragged back through the slick warmth. Sherlock hummed into the sheets, and John could feel him trying to roll his hips in response, rut himself against the bedclothes, but John had him pinned. He rocked his own pelvis front to back, finding a moderate, even pace. He leaned forward.

“When you were fucking for money,” he panted, and redirected his cock for a few strokes, so it thrust down between Sherlock’s thighs, the tip rushing past his tight asshole along the way and making Sherlock whimper and wiggle beneath him. “Fucking for drugs. . .”

“ _Mmpf_ ,” was Sherlock’s sparing reply. He turned his head, dragged his cheek and nose upward, then down, inhaling hard the scent of John’s toiletries from the bedclothes.

John leaned up and away, went back to working his prick along Sherlock’s slit from the lower curve of his ass up toward his lower back; there were dimples there at the base of his spine and John let the tips of his index fingers press into them.

“Tell me.”

Sherlock huffed a hollow, monosyllabic laugh.

“Escorting websites, or out on the pavements?”

“ _Mmm_!” John hummed heavily, and adjusted his knees to find an angle with more friction. The crown of his cock bled pre-cum between Sherlock’s pale asscheeks. John slapped, raised a pleasingly pink welt. “Streets.”

“Look for eye contact,” Sherlock muttered, and despite the extremely limited range of motion, began to rut slightly against the bed, then back against John, in shallow rhythm. “Tapping a wristwatch, raising an eyebrow.”

“What’s that? The watch?” John demanded in a breathy, low voice. He urged Sherlock’s buttocks closer around his shaft with firm hands.

“ _Got the time?_ ” Sherlock clarified. “Or maybe he takes cash from his pocket and counts it, flashes it.”

“And you?”

“Tongue or teeth on the lips. Quick slide of the hand over the trousers to highlight the merchandise.”

John groaned, shifted his position again, cock thrusting straight down where ass and thighs meet, four points of contact, surrounding his prick in tight, slick heat. He collapsed onto Sherlock’s back, teeth digging momentarily into his shoulder, making Sherlock whine. Less concentrated weight against the backs of his legs meant Sherlock could move more freely, even slipped his own hand beneath his body to stroke his cock. John pinched the back of his upper arm and Sherlock yelped his pain.

“And.” John’s breath was hot against Sherlock’s back, his long white neck.

“One or the other tilts a head toward a mens’ room or a hedge or an alley, and the other follows.”

Sherlock rutted hard into his hand, and John chased him forward and down, pressing between taut banks of flesh.

“A price is quoted—inevitably argued about—and his trousers are opened.”

“You sucked them off,” John gusted desperately, raking his upper teeth over the freckled skin of Sherlock’s shoulder where it met his neck. “On your knees.” He braced himself on one elbow and his other hand tangled in Sherlock’s hair and pulled hard and steady, back, and back, and down. “Probably ruined your posh trousers in puddles of piss.”

“Doctor Watson, where is your _gun_?” Nearly a sing-song.

“Not now.” John’s thrusts were urgent, he was nearing the crest now, and he shifted his thighs a bit, seeking depth, slippery warmth, _more_.

“Chest to chest, no kissing, god no, but one hand circled round and the other beneath, rolling the bollocks. To speed things along.” Sherlock’s hand appeared from beneath his pelvis, and he licked a wide, wet stripe along his palm and his long fingers before shoving it home again. “Or, yes, if the price is right, kneeling, with a willing mouth. Usually faster, but more taxing.” John growled. “Hence the price differential.”

John’s voice was higher, all breath and no volume. “How many?” He shoved Sherlock’s head forward, caught his jaw between his teeth for an instant before his mouth fell open again against a gust of hard breath rushing out of him.

“Fuck!” Sherlock panted: annoyed at the pestering, thrilled at the pain, swept along on the torrential forward-thundering current of John’s energy, high as a windhover, racing toward the finish. “Three a night? Sometimes just one generous one.”

“ _Filthy slut_ ,” John spat out, and his hips juttered out of rhythm, and his body tensed all along Sherlock’s back. He grasped Sherlock’s shoulders with both hands, pulling forward, pressing down, as if he could propel himself into Sherlock, through his skin, and he let go a long, agonized-sounding shout before crashing down again, shuddering into limp liquidity on top of Sherlock’s back. John’s now-sticky cock still slid against Sherlock’s ass as Sherlock rode his hand, eyes disconcertingly wide open, dark-pink lips beginning to crack under gusts of arid breath. John turned his head, nudged Sherlock’s dark curls aside with his nose, stroked the flat of his tongue against the back of Sherlock’s neck. He opened his mouth and bit down hard. Sherlock whinnied and wriggled and let out a sighing moan and eventually went still beneath him, only his chest expanding and collapsing with quieting breath. John rolled away, onto his back.

*

Midnight train to London. John was vaguely surprised that packing up his three-weeks-a-month Berwick life took up no more space than his one-week-a-month things, all of it fitting neatly into his army rucksack. His laptop, half a dozen shirts, and an envelope holding his birth certificate and army discharge papers. He left his books. He took his gun.

Sherlock was an annoying, shivering wreck beside him. Just over an hour into the journey, John was fed up enough to dig in his rucksack for an amber-plastic prescription bottle, the sight of which elicited a greedy, spoiled-child look from Sherlock that made John want to punch him to sleep.

“Don’t say I never gave you anything, gorgeous,” John grunted. He’d long ago finished the fifth Sherlock had gifted him earlier in the night, and had dipped into his own, full-size bottle of Macallan. He was blurred at the edges, eyes growing heavy, muscles thick with fatigue—a fight, a fuck, a fifth. . .ideal fucking evening, wasn’t it?

Sherlock, bereft of his usual tools of china saucer and silver spoon (naturally! probably the one he was born suckling on), didn’t bother with crushing and snorting the pain pills, instead tossed them toward the back of his tongue and liberated the bottle from John’s slackening hand. He swallowed twice, gasping and shaking his head against the burn that reddened his eyes, and passed the bottle back.

Sherlock fidgeted in his seat, all elbows and knees, invading John’s space in a way that would have made him jump up and pummel him if only he wasn’t too drunk to get to his feet. He reckoned he’d have to tolerate another ten or fifteen minutes of it before the opiates started to wash through Sherlock’s system and settle him down. There was only one other bloke in their carriage, across the way and a few seats up, and he glanced at them warily now and then, pretending hard to be reading something on an electronic book. John could only (vaguely) imagine the picture the two of them must be painting: a drunken old sod and his tweaky, over-aged party boy companion. The pair of them. But fuck it.

John was nearly asleep when Sherlock—in something more like his normal voice, low as distant thunder, but now beginning to slur as the opiates syruped their way into his brain—intoned, “Why are you still alive, Doctor Watson?”

“Mm?” John slow-motion startled, half-opened one eye. “The fuck are you on about?”

“You’ve got that gun.”

“I was all right, until I met you.”

Sherlock didn’t reply and for a long moment it seemed he might have drifted off. John’s eyes fell back shut.

“I was never all right,” Sherlock eventually slurred. “Deductions. Solving crimes. Knowing things.” He paused again, much longer than he should have; John could tell he was nodding out. “S’all I’ve ever been good for. I’m useless. Broken. Everything hurts.”

“Why are _you_ still alive, then?” John mumbled, somewhere between curious and challenging.

Just when John became sure Sherlock was not going to answer, he finally said, “I was all right, until I met you.”

John looked at him, then; he was grinning crookedly, eyelids at half-mast, body slumped bonelessly in the seat.

“You lie and lie, gorgeous. That boyfriend of yours was spot on about that.”

“But _really_ why?” Sherlock implored, circling back to his original question.

John turned his face to the window but when he couldn’t see past his own haggard reflection, he turned  back toward Sherlock.

“Put the pistol to my head many a time,” he admitted, and aimed two fingers at his temple to illustrate. “It just seemed. . .” He shrugged. “It was just too _hard_.”

Sherlock hummed. Eyes fully closed, he began a slow-motion sideways collapse, ended up against John’s shoulder. John focused on the comfortable motion of the train rather than the disconcerting  spin behind his closed eyes, and let his heavier and heavier head come to rest against Sherlock’s lolling one as he slipped out of consciousness. No matter. Nearly there.


	5. In Between Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and the next are the end, of this story, and of this series. Since it's been a long while since I last updated, I might suggest reading "Am and Was" from the beginning to refresh your memory of where we left off, or if not the entire story, the immediately preceding chapter (Chapter 4); these two chapters contain meaningful references to events in Chapter 4. 
> 
> These chapters contain potentially squicky or even triggering content. In case you skipped the tags, please be warned these chapters contain:
> 
> Non-Consensual/Dubiously-Consensual sex  
> Self-Harm (cutting)  
> Graphic IV drug use and abuse of alcohol  
> Graphic descriptions of physical illness  
> Blood  
> Prostitution  
> Gunplay  
> Graphic violence including punching, kicking, and choking
> 
> MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH

_Time has frittered long and slow_  
_All I am and was will go_  
_But where to? And why now?_

*

 

Well, this was a fucking turn up. Sherlock Holmes was killing him.

John had known he’d never survive it. He’d _planned_ not to survive it; that was the whole point of the thing—taking that first drink, quitting his job, holing up in Sherlock’s messy, dusty-smelling flat. He’d wondered, too, if he might kill Sherlock, too, in some intentional accident—bash his skull open against a wall, or punch him unconscious, then beyond. . .Christ, maybe fuck him to death, if that were possible. This, though—Sherlock looming over him, pinning John’s forearms to the floor with his knees, Sherlock red-faced and rage-crying, Sherlock’s arms locked straight as those ridiculously huge hands squeezed hard around John’s throat—this wasn’t something he’d ever envisioned.

Suicidal intentions aside, John puts up a hell of a fight, rocking and wriggling, kicking his feet. Survival instinct and a ringing sense of injustice ( _it wasn’t supposed to happen like this!_ ) make him struggle against it, even as his vision goes blurry and grey at the edges, closing down like the shutter of a camera. Fuck’s sake, Sherlock could have at least let him get his trousers open, get to his cock so he could make himself come as he asphyxiated—it must be pretty fucking good if men famous enough to have evening-news-leading obituaries were willing to be found hanging naked from hotel room coat hooks, stripped of clothing and dignity and presumably covered in water-based lubricant and their own flaking, dried-up spunk. But no, Sherlock was set to prove what a big fucking man he was, skipped straight past the hate-sex and went right for the throat.  John has all but goaded him into it of course, but the point remains: this isn’t how John had thought it would end.

*

 

John lies to the landlady that he’s lost his keys in the move, promises to give her copies of new ones, and changes the locks on the doors to the flat. He’s not interested in that busybody walking in at her leisure, now he’s living here full time. Not to mention Sherlock’s cop boyfriend (ex-boyfriend) had used his own key, and John didn’t want him showing up drunk some night, nosing around after Sherlock’s skinny arse, just this once sweetheart, for old time’s sake. John will never get around to giving the landlady a key—he’s never intended to.

Tuesday night’s a fight night, but Sherlock and John are bounced before they get all the way in.

“Naw, mate! Had a couple at the pub around the corner is all.” John gestures vaguely toward the men already gathering inside the dim-lit garage. “He was there, down the other end of the bar, he’ll tell you.” The man shakes his head, otherwise looks unmoved. John makes one last-ditch attempt to persuade him. “Look here.” He touches his nose with one finger, as if it proves something.

“You’re drunk,” the bloke with the list intones, and two even larger blokes close in, essentially cutting John and Sherlock off from the rest of the room. “And fuck if I know what _he’s_ on.” He jerks his thumb toward Sherlock, tilting slowly to his right, eyes closed, nodding off on his feet. “You ain’t gettin’ in’ere tonight. You know the rules. Fuck off, the two of you.”

John sees it is pointless to argue, instead rears back and swings an absolute haymaker at the biggest of the three, misses by a mile, and goes sprawling across the table top. The commotion snaps Sherlock to attention but the three are on them before his eyes can even focus: hands gripping biceps, wrenching arms back painfully, shoving, dragging, and it isn’t an entire minute before John and Sherlock are outside again. John kicks the brick wall, shouts out a curse. Sherlock begins a serpentine walk up the pavement, eyes fixed ahead and above him at an unnatural, counter-intuitive angle. John paces in front of the door as if he might try to go back in, but in the end merely shuffles after Sherlock. They trade a few punches along the way to the main road—Sherlock even gets John in a decent enough headlock but can’t hold it and John slithers away, stumbles into a lamp post before regaining himself. Once they’re in a taxi, John lets Sherlock bite his neck a bit before shoving him away, and Sherlock sinks against the door until John’s sharp slap to his thigh rouses him and they fall out of the cab onto the Baker Street pavement.

Up the stairs and in, and already John is feeling less drunk, not nearly drunk enough. Sherlock is bordering on useless, dropping his coat on the floor, falling against the wall as he tries to take off his shoes. He slides down the wall until he is sat on the floor in the little hallway between the kitchen and his bedroom, back to the wall, head lolling back, mouth falling slightly open. John boots him a sharp one in the thigh on his way past.

“Up, gorgeous.”

Sherlock groans, manages to rise to hands and knees, crawls after John toward his room. He catches John with both arms clamped around his lower legs, toppling him to the floor. They grapple there in the narrow space between Sherlock’s bed and wall. John twists and rolls—nearly retching from a sudden spin in his head—and catches Sherlock’s hair at the back of his head, tugs hard until Sherlock lets out a quick shout and swings one hand uselessly at John’s wrist. John gives one good yank, then releases him, wrestles his skinny forearms around and up until he’s pinned Sherlock to the floor, straddling his chest with knees and shins immobilizing Sherlock’s arms against the carpet. Sherlock grins crookedly up at him through nearly-closed eyes.

“Something funny, gorgeous?”

Sherlock snorts and slowly rocks his head side to side in the negative. “Not a thing, Doctor Watson.” He casts a glance toward John’s fly. “Let me.” A demand, something threatening skating the edge, making Sherlock’s smirk look suddenly weird and cruel.

“Far be it from me to argue,” John gruffs, and releases Sherlock, braces himself against the mattress’s edge to get to his feet. Sherlock shambles up after him, goes for John’s belt and fumbles it open, grabs John with both fists balled up in his shirtfront, pulling him in quick and hard to catch John’s lip between his teeth, burns his lips on the stubble of John’s chin on his way to biting his jaw. John gives way, tugs his collar aside to bare more of his throat, collarbone, shoulder.

Eventually they’re both undressed, under and over each other, leaving reddened rings of slit-shaped imprints where teeth sink in to bite, sucking hard to raise bruises, pinching with cruel knuckles, scraping with raggedly torn and bitten fingernails, marking each other all over. They groan and gasp, slap faces and hands away, but keep at it because each starburst of pain releases and reaffirms—no feelings but this, easy to name and define and survive. For now.

John can barely get half-hard, and it’s another age before he gets much past that, and even then only in increments, two steps forward and one back. Sherlock’s high—by contrast—warms and fuzzes him, and he is content to settle low on the mattress with knees drawn up, licking and sucking and nuzzling and nipping at John’s bollocks and prick, working the tip of his nose into John’s pubic hair to inhale deeply, and dragging impossibly long fingers along John’s length at half-speed and quarter-pressure. John lets himself sink deep into the pillow, drifts in and out of something quite unlike sleep, occasionally rousing with a grunt or a gasp when Sherlock hits upon something particularly cunning. Eventually they both succumb to heavy nothingness, neither really finished, curled up on their sides with John’s knees against Sherlock’s chest, Sherlock’s breath low and thin against John’s belly.

*

 

A week on, and Sherlock’s pills have already run out.

He is bent into his leather chair, feet planted close to one hip, knees toward the ceiling, bare toes clutching the edge. The bulb of bone at the outside of his ankle deforms rivulets of bright, running blood as he works his way around an imaginary clock face, describing a twelve-pointed asterisk on his lower calf with a double-edged razor blade clamped between thumb and curled forefinger. Each time the slithering edge breaks the surface and the blood beads up, quivers, and runs, Sherlock shimmers an intense jot of pain, mezzo-soprano counterpoint to the persistent, contralto ache in his thigh muscles and upper back, girdling his hips, humming down his arms. He is composing a cantata for meat and blood, hideous, perfect.

The pad of his middle finger dips hard onto the starburst pattern of the cuts, discouraging a clot through persistent irritation, swipes the back of his opposite wrist across his sweating forehead. He fends off a brief threat of nausea by closing his eyes and consciously exhaling every last drop of breath—by tomorrow he’ll be vomiting but for now he can will it away, or ignore it. He returns his focus to the concert of throbbing, thrumming body-aches and slivery bursts of sharp agony; it is positively glorious. The quick distraction of each new cut catches his mind the same way a bird’s sudden flutter into flight can catch the eye. The ache never subsides, and soon enough it will sink into his joints, and then into his bones, and make every motion—even stillness—an impossible torture, will drive him to seek relief from that other tiny point of dazzling pain: the needle stick he has longed for, as he at last dips into the glass bottle glimmering in wait on the kitchen countertop. For now, though, the pain in his muscles is only enough to make him feel grumpy and wide-awake.

He’d started at the twelve o-clock mark, and has now made his way around to eight. Three to go and he is losing his nerve. The whole point of it was to quiet his racing mind, give the thoughts that stick so hard they creep out of his brain and into his veins a fresh way out of him, a sharp, slick release so that he can rest. But his significantly altered mental state has his mind obsessively replaying variations on a theme: plodding through the flat picking up one amber plastic pill bottle after the next, finding every one empty and tossing it away so now the floor is littered with them. The smooth curve of the glass bottle he has picked up and put down, picked up and put down, picked up and sniffed and caressed, and put down. The crackle of sterile plastic-wrapped syringes. His aching muscles. His roiling gut. Calculating the dose that will get him high but not kill him. Calculating the number of doses so that what is left could be just enough to kill him. Sherlock could cut himself a thousand times and it would never drown out the cacophony that is his junkie-mind because now he is dopesick and dying and he will never again think about anything but this.

Too quick to let himself refuse, Sherlock makes a slit at nine o’clock—deep, blood burbling up quick as if it has been waiting there for him to free it. He sucks a breath and shifts his spine so that the muscles beneath his shoulder blades throb dully, then over-tighten, and stay that way.

Ah, but now here was John Watson, sliding three more six-packs of beer into the fridge, leaving a brown paper bag on the worktop that thunks with the weight of three tall bottles, clinking lightly against each other before they fully settle.

“How’s that coming along?” John asks, and his smirk is cruel. It’s early afternoon; he’d woken a few hours earlier, gone out for salty, vinegar-soaked chips and to lay in these supplies: eighteen stout beers and three bottles of whisky, still the Macallan, though probably not one of the better ones.

“You tell me.” Sherlock’s symphony of pain crowds out his shame at engaging in his most precious diversion, right here in the open, in daylight, with John Watson now in attendance.

John pulls a beer from the fridge, pops the top, puts it down in several long swallows, then reaches for two more and crosses to the lounge, letting out a sonorous belch as he comes. The set of his jaw and the creases in his forehead gave him away as headachey and hungover. The smear of grease on his shirtfront let Sherlock deduce that he’d been at the chipper, trying to settle his stomach. The determination with which he was drinking the beers means Sherlock has no more than an hour to entice him before he is too drunk to fuck.

“You know what I think of it,” John intones. “Pass me your copy of Smash Hits, princess—it’s got  a centerfold pin-up of that dreamy one from whatever-the-fuck.”

Sherlock curlsthe right side of his mouth into a sneer, slips the blade half-heartedly through ten o’clock. His hand shakes, his arm shakes, his elbow throbs with fresh pain. He let the sudden chill he’s feeling take him over utterly, and it is so much like being held and shaken. _How many times do I have tell you? Christ, you’re so stupid. What’s wrong with you? Answer me._ His body is wracked and he wraps his long arms around his folded knees, hugging himself. His teeth rattle painfully against each other, trembling chin utterly uncontrollable until he digs it hard against his knee.

John makes a scoffing sound, drains the second beer and smacks the empty can down on the side table. Sherlock’s body quickly warms, then shudders with a flash of chill, then warms again to something like normal. He nicks eleven o’clock and though it’s half-hearted and he’s lost interest, at least now it’s finished. He cleans the flat of the blade with a slow downward drag along his bottom lip that deforms his mouth into a weird pout he’s seen in the bathroom mirror, until the blade slips free. He tosses the blade onto the little cabinet beside his chair; it skids farther than he intended but doesn’t fall over the edge.

“Gonna ruin your nice chair, there, gorgeous,” John warns, tipping his chin toward the bloody mess of Sherlock’s calf and ankle. “So what happens now?”

Sherlock fixes a stare at John’s eyes and takes a few beats before he says. “Nothing else. It’s finished.”

“Feel better?” and it is on the tip of Sherlock’s tongue to say no, not really, except that there is a sneer in John’s tone that makes it clear he isn’t expecting an answer. And anyway, John’s attention has shifted.

There is a tall, brass can set by the fire, to hold fireplace tools, and it does have a heavy, black metal poker it in it. But there are also two canes (one simple rattan, the other fashioned to mimic the schoolhouse type), the riding crop (its length wound round with silk; leather keeper oiled and slick on one side, nubbly and suede-like on the other), three  umbrellas (all stolen, two broken), and a length of copper pipe. John’s eyes are fixed upon the upper ends of these, resting at angles against the rim of the canister. He leans, catches the crop between his first two fingers, lifts, pulls, catches it and draws it to him. He grips the handle far too near the end, slides the fingers of his opposite hands up along the shaft, turns it to examine both sides of its little tongue. He gives an experimental flick of his wrist and the flat keeper slaps feebly down on the heel of his palm. Sherlock feels this in his neck.

“Haven’t seen a horse ‘round here,” John says, and his smile is tilted, mean. “What’s this for?”

Sherlock looks down at his ankle; nearly all the blood is congealing, already drying. He flexes his toes and the ghosts of bloodtrails crack apart as his tendons shift. When he looks up again, John is holding out the crop to him, handle first. Sherlock wraps his fingers around it and pulls it to him, across his shins, catching the opposite end between his fingers and caging himself.

He says, “You’re just trying to get me to say what we both already know to be true. Because you think it will humiliate me.”

“No.”

“Why then?”

“What’s it _for_?”

 “. . .It’s for me.”

“Because it gets me hot—thinking of you. . .like that.”

“Hurt.”

“Not that. Not just that,” John says, and shakes his head, and opens the last beer. He licks his lips. “ _Low_.”

Sherlock nods, slowly, once.

“So the boyfriend—what?—took a couple swings, put some welts on you so he could kiss and coo about it after?”

“I told you. It wasn’t like that.”

“Who, then?”

Sherlock unfurls, puts his feet on the floor, straightens his aching spine. He rests the crop across his knees, rolls it slowly up and back beneath his fingertips. He waves one hand in the air dismissively. “Whoever.”

John nods.

After a long silent moment, scenting the air between them, thick with mutual hunger and the threat of imminent violence,  Sherlock says, “I had a client—“

“Not interested.”

“—who found me via _Gentlemen’s Agreement_ dot com,” Sherlock continues, and knows without looking that this will have captured John’s full attention. “He was middle-aged, quite well-off, worked in some sort of multinational, financial, whatever-it-was. Not handsome, but kept fit. Married, of course. They were all married. We met twice a week for several months; he kept a suite at the Regent but wouldn’t let me live there, which lead me to believe I was not the only gentlemen with whom he had an agreement.”

“How much did he pay you?”

“He was generous.”

“How much? For your _arse_?” The warped smile again.

“We enjoyed each other’s company, and now and then I’d find some cash he’d slipped into my trousers’ pocket while I showered. Three or four thousand, usually.”

John’s eyes widen. “A week?”

“Twice a week.”

“Jeezus.”

 “As I said, he was generous.” Sherlock dangles the crop down by his ankle, stroking the keeper back and forth across his bare instep, loose grip on the handle between his thumb and two fingers. “He liked me to use him.”

John says nothing, but his eyebrows make a slight hop upward.

Sherlock’s voice now comes a half-step lower in tone and volume: “Open your trousers, Doctor Watson.”

John strokes his chin and cheek with three fingers of one hand, crumples his mouth thoughtfully.

“I want to see your cock.”

The crop comes up between them and its little leather tongue brushes across John’s fly.

Expectant, with an edge of _or else_ in it. “Now.”

Sherlock withdraws the crop, swings it gracefully up in front of him, angled like his violin bow, adjusts his grip. He traps the keeper between his fingertips and bends the crop slightly, creating a long, graceful arch in front of his chest.

“Come on over here and kneel down for me, gorgeous,” John says then. “Lick those dirty lips of yours. I’ll let you see it right up close before I shove it down your throat.” John’s expression is wolfish. He shifts his hips forward on the chair, lets his thighs fall slightly apart.

Sherlock is on his feet and at him in a blink, swings the crop down in a sharp, stinging lick that catches the top of John’s shoulder. His own shoulder throbs in protest at the sudden motion, and the muscles of his legs rebel against it by cramping. John’s hand goes to his shoulder and neck, rubbing the pain away.

Sherlock’s voice is steady, almost casual, though it brooks no argument. “Give me what I want.” He rises again to his full height, the riding crop low at his side but still tight in his fist.

Now it is John who leaps up, thrusting a sharp uppercut that connects just below Sherlock’s ribs and makes him lose his breath in a gust, then gasp it back. The crop flies again, a swift, sharp crack across John’s bicep, then across his back as he turns away from it. They grapple, trading balance, John throwing fists and gnashing teeth, Sherlock kicking and giving an ineffective smack with the crop where he can.

John is sluggish, slightly sick—having poured alcohol onto a hangover—and Sherlock quickly overpowers him, wrenches his arms, kicks the back of his knees until they buckle, shoves hard to topple him. John ends exactly where Sherlock wants him: forced into the corner of Sherlock’s chair with the crop threaded through his elbows, behind his back, immobilizing his arms and thrusting his chest forward.  Sherlock pins him with a forearm braced high across his chest and makes quick work of opening John’s trousers, shoves his shirttails up and out of the way.

John growls through clenched teeth: “Get the fuck off me.” He struggles, grimacing at the pain of the crop’s shaft digging at his spine as he thrashes.

“Hush.” Sherlock yanks the drawstring on his own pyjama bottoms, licks his palm and fingers with a wide swipe of his tongue.

The condescending scold infuriates John, and he lifts his head enough to press his open mouth against Sherlock’s bicep, bites down hard. The roar Sherlock lets out rubs his throat raw as it goes.

John snarls. “Ain’t happening, gorgeous.”

“ _Shhh_!” Sherlock hisses, and shifts his torso away so that John cannot bite him again, pins him at the hip as his fingers curl around John’s prick—half-hard, no surprise—and drag a squeezing slide along his length.

“ _Christ_ —“ John gasps, indignant and appreciative.

“It’ll do,” Sherlock says, avoiding John’s gaze. John Watson is a prop he will use to get to the prize: the electric crackle and molten heat of the surprisingly intense dopesick orgasm. He spits into his hand for good measure, then pins John’s semi-erection flat against his belly, positions his own swollen length against it, and begins to thrust, both cocks trapped beneath the arch of his hand.

John’s breath is ragged with lust, but he struggles. One heel stamps down, a momentary distraction glancing off the tight-flexed muscle of Sherlock’s calf.

Sherlock ruts hard and quick against John’s cock, grunting, whining, unself-conscious. It’s masturbatory, utterly selfish, no care for John’s pleasure or even his comfort. Sherlock avoids his gaze, barely registers his presence but for the intense heat where they touch, and his low, angry sounds.

“Mm. . . _Uh_.” Sherlock drops his hip, adjusts his angle, tightens the arch of his fingers around their cocks as he thrusts and thrusts, the early edge of his orgasm already in view.

John huffs mightily, and his hips rock a bit, seeking friction, but Sherlock holds him fast against the corner of the chair, keeps John’s prick nestled in his thatch of pubic hair, its crown oozing pre-cum onto his belly. Sherlock lets his chest sink down onto John’s now, and their sweaty skin sticks and rips with each thrust against John’s cock. Close, so close, skin tingling, too warm everywhere, biting his lip.

“ _Unh_. . .oh fuck oh _fuck_. . .”

Sherlock rocks back hard, jerks forward harder, in quick staccato rhythm. The heat of John’s prick covered in pre-cum and saliva is intense and Sherlock ruts desperately. Now Sherlock is hard wrapped in soft, warm and wet and slippery. . .

Moaning: “Yes. Yes. _Yes_.”

John snorts and gargles and spits. A slimy lump hits Sherlock’s cheek, flecks of spittle wetting his eyelashes and the bridge of his nose. Sherlock keeps up the pace, he is nearly there, _nearly there_ , his every aching muscle taut and sparking beneath his too-tight, goose-bumped skin, every hair on his body lifting to sense the movement of the air. He rubs his face hard against John’s, wiping the spit and snot back onto him, fuck him anyway, he’s nothing, and

“UH UH YES _fuck_!”

Sherlock comes hard, his body ringing with it like metal-struck glass, his brain oozing liquid lightning behind his eyes to wash along each wrinkle in his brain and pour down his spine; it’s simple and shocking and the pain in his muscles turns bright and brittle. His cum strings out onto John’s belly, hot and copious, and John’s cock twitches in sympathy, and their chests heave with panting breath.

Sherlock braces his hands against John’s shoulders, pushes himself up and away. John groans at the loss, his erection springing away from his body. Sherlock vanishes behind the bathroom door.

*

 

Buzzing, buzzing. Sherlock dreams of fat bumblebees, slow-motion crawling up his arms, his legs, beneath the hem of his t-shirt, beneath the waves of his hair. If he opens his lips they will creep into his mouth, then out again, leaving a taste of honey.

_These last few texts you sent are nonsense. Where are you? .G._

Sherlock peels an eye quarter-open; John Watson is passed out naked on the far edge of the bed, one leg wound up in the bed sheet. He is snoring like a locomotive and his breath reeks of stale beer and sweet/sour bile. Sherlock closes his eyes.

Buzzing, buzzing. He dreams a train rolling far into the distance, open-topped carriages loaded to overflowing with used syringes.

_Look, text me back you’re OK, will you? .G._

Buzzing, buzzing. Sherlock dreams the room is full of wasps, and when they sting they leave bruises inside his elbows and wrists, and on the tops of his feet. They smell like burnt batteries and their wings are pale blue paper, elaborately folded.

_I’m coming to your flat if I don’t hear from you by 8a.m. .G._

Buzzing, buzzing. Sherlock dreams he vibrates at high frequency, throbbing high voltage, too hot to touch, and his skin peels away to reveal clockwork and rotten meat and pale blue paper squares, every one unfolded and licked clean.

*

 

Waking is like swimming up from a great depth, under pressure, in a riptide. When John surfaces at last, his eyes are cloudy and his ears too cottony to discern the crisp edges of sounds. A siren is singing to him, somewhere in the distance far behind, a staccato rhythm of descending tones that sound like sobbing grief, but his limbs are too heavy and waterlogged to turn him so he just stays where he is, treading water, and lets his eyes close, falls asleep to it.

*

 

They’ve lost all track of time; John slumps passed out in his chair or on the sofa, sometimes in Sherlock’s bed, his own too far from the loo now that he vomits semi-regularly. Sherlock nods off standing in the lounge, has fallen off a kitchen chair and spent several hours on the floor under the table. John has laid in whisky enough to do the job (or at least he figures so, given that the whites of his eyes are already tinged faintly yellow). And anyway, there is always the gun.

Watching Sherlock shoot up firms his prick, rouses him from his daze enough to lick his lips, pinch Sherlock hard on the arm, make a few disastrous attempts at consummation that all end with Sherlock nodding away into unconsciousness and John’s cock failing him well before he gets close to coming. They haven’t left the flat in nearly two weeks. Spent, blood-flaked needles litter the tabletops. A glass John threw at Sherlock’s head one night hit the wall instead, shattered, and now glitters in ten million pieces near the baseboards when the low afternoon sun oozes through a crack in the drapes.

Sherlock’s tolerance for morphine is heroic; John was sure he’d be dead within minutes of the first dose he drew from the little silver-capped glass bottle. At the current rate, he has enough for another week, at most. He stands in the loo, leaning against the wall beside the toilet, running the shower, for hours at a time; he can’t piss. They have no food, nor desire for it, so every other day when John wakes up nauseated and headachey from nearly-erotic dreams of salty, vinegar-soaked chips, deep-fried Mars bars from the van outside the pub, he peels the bits of green-blue fuzz off what’s left of the bread, drops it in the toaster and forgets about it. John’s gut is wrecked, his shit blackened with blood.

Sherlock wakes from his stupours to text the ex-boyfriend relentlessly, or to cut himself with fountain pen nibs, pocket knives, letter openers. John isn’t sure when, but the violin went away—perhaps about he the same time a fluttering pile of folded, pale-blue paper packets arrived to rest in his china saucer, weighted down with the heavy silver spoon he used to crush pills before they ran out. There are smears of Sherlock’s blood on every wall, chair, worktop, and drawer-pull in the flat, and an almost-complete footprint in the hallway outside the bathroom door: each toe-tip distinct, the ball of his foot and the outer edge, now brick-brown and slightly smudged. His arms are a riot of bruises and angry pinpricks; he uses John’s belt to tie himself off, tugs the length of it tight through the metal buckle—which smashes cruelly against his skin, turning it white—then grips it in his teeth to hold it fast. Then the sharp slaps, skin against his skin, as Sherlock tries to raise a vein; John hears them even in his whisky-soaked sleep. There is nothing about Sherlock’s ritual John doesn’t find arousing: the crackle of the sterile plastic wrapper around each new syringe as Sherlock tears it with his teeth; the way his eyes narrow and his pale fingers tremble as he draws up the shot; the belt; the bite; the _smack-smack-smack_. The look of perfect, insane bliss on Sherlock’s face as his head lolls and his eyes roll back and he sighs, sometimes collapsing back with the belt still hanging loose around his bicep and the needle dangling from his arm.

And, of course, John can see Sherlock’s game even through the muzzy fog of his perpetual drunkenness: where once he incited John to violence so that he’d have bruises and cuts enough for that ex-boyfriend the cop to coo over, now he’s trying to manipulate John into comforting him—kissing and cuddling and stroking his hair, or whatever the fuck it is he’s after—because he gets off on the _oh-you-poor-precious-baby_ fawning just as much as he does the kicking and slugging and forcible sodomy. But since John chased off the boyfriend, Sherlock’s hurt/comfort circuit is left open. Just never-ending pain and no one to kiss it better and calm him down. Poor him.

He’s coming down from the high of his last fix and seems almost normal, a slowed-down version of himself. He paces—but languidly, like a cat—and frequently stops along the way to fill the kettle; or to stare at his pallid, bony face in the mirror; or to slide a book from the shelf, fan the pages open and inhale before dropping it on the floor or the tea table or the armchair John thinks of as his. John remembered to eat the toast this time, so his gut has temporarily settled, and he has turned a re-run of an already decided rugby match on the television, half-watches, half-dozes on the sofa, feet propped on the coffee table. In another hour—two at the outside—Sherlock will be clearing a spot to sit, gathering the belt, the syringe, the glass bottle of morphine. Then his icy-green eyes will go glassy and glittering (if he can keep them open) and he will smile as if he has just recalled something supremely clever he said once, long ago.

“Here, gorgeous,” John slurs, and pats his trousers-front with one hand. “Make yourself useful, why don’t you? Open that smart mouth for me.” He cracks a crooked grin. “And let me fuck it.”

Sherlock stops short on his trail through the lounge, and his expression is the contemptuous, down-the-nose one that once suited the bespoke jackets and the barber-provided shave. Barefoot, in a blood-spattered t-shirt at once too small and too big for him, wearing pyjama bottoms fraying at the cuffs, and with his wavy hair matted and greasy, though, Sherlock looks all but imposing, the jester who fancies himself king. John sniffs and shakes his head at the sight of him.

“When did you last shower?” Sherlock sneers, raising one eyebrow.

“Shut up and c’mere.” John slides his flattened palm slowly up and down, and the edge of his generous erection is obvious beneath the fabric of his trousers. “Don’t play hard to get, gorgeous, when I know very well you’re a whore.”

Sherlock sniffs, tosses his head to the side in a half-shake. “Then you should know I don’t give it away for free.”

“I’ll pay you in black-and-blue.” John’s eyes are half-shut; his words run together lazily as he speaks. He slides his hips forward, spreads his knees, unfastens his trousers to free his prick. “Come on, now. I’ll fatten your lip for you before you start.” He nods toward the floor between his feet, more casual command than invitation, and his tone implies he does not expect a refusal.

“Not interested.”

“We both know that’s a lie,” John sighs roughly, and spits into his palm, and starts to pull. “Take off your shirt, let’s have a look.”

“Your drinking makes you lazy, Doctor Watson,” Sherlock says dismissively. “There’s nothing in it for me now.”

John huffs a half-laugh through his nose. “You’re trying to goad me.”

Sherlock shrugs in slow motion, turns to leave.

John launches forward with extended arms, tackles him straight to the floor in one quick, hard motion. Sherlock’s breath leaves him as his back hits the carpet, at a severe disadvantage. John’s face contorts with furious cruelty, and he smacks Sherlock hard across the temple with an open hand, shouting. “That what you want? Want it to hurt? _Hm?_ You _like it_ when it hurts.” Sherlock tries to push John off with huge palms braced against John’s chest, but the angle is wrong, and John hits him and hits him, punching and slapping at his face and head, boxing his ear and making it ring. “You told me that once,” John mutters. “Told me you like when it hurts. So. All right.” He has wrestled one of Sherlock’s knees into the hook of his elbow, tugs and yanks at his pyjama bottoms until the drawstring breaks and they tear apart as he tugs them down out of the way. “It’ll fucking _hurt_.”

“Off!” Sherlock shouts, and bites the edge of John’s jaw, upper teeth sinking into the meat of John’s cheek, greasy-tasting and grizzled with stubble.

“Tap out and we’re done here,” John grunts, but his body is weighty and stolid above Sherlock’s, pinning him to the floor. He stuffs his first two fingers into Sherlock’s mouth, thrusting and sweeping across his tongue. “ _Hunh_?” he demands. “Tap out and we’re done.”

Sherlock gags on John’s fingers even as he rolls his tongue around them. He turns his head hard to one side and John withdraws, shoves his hand down between their bodies, nudging the fabric of Sherlock’s ruined clothing aside with his wrist.

Sherlock says nothing, makes no move to end it, only hums a groan through pursed lips.

“Thought so.” John’s fingers push in without prelude, and Sherlock shouts. John’s open mouth is sloppy, wet, and mean against Sherlock’s bared throat. He ruts his cock in the space between belly and thigh as he works his fingers inside Sherlock, thrusting too hard, twisting too fast. “S’what you want, yeh?” he growls. “Filthy whore.”

John shifts the weight of his body to settle low between Sherlock’s legs—one of Sherlock’s long feet is braced on the floor to give him leverage to struggle, but the other leg is still hopelessly tangled up with John’s arm.

There is banging on the floor, the landlady with her fucking broom handle, they’re _too loud, what on earth do they get up to in there and you know I need that key, Dr Watson, for the new locks_.

John grasps his cock, sliding and shoving up against Sherlock—ready as he’ll ever be—and Sherlock renews his efforts to get out from under him, gets in one good punch to the broadest part of John’s face. John gasps, then laughs. “Enough of that,” he commands, and thrusts himself forward, feet and knees scrabbling against the carpet to propel him, thoroughly relentless. “You want it to hurt, slut.” He rears back, slams forward. Sherlock shouts. “So does it? _Does it? Fucking? **Hurt?**_ ”

Sherlock groans, biting his lower lip so hard it’s white, squeezing his eyes shut, and he nods.

“Fucking right.” John’s thrusts are hard, deep, dragging cruelly with only their mingled saliva to ease the way. He is inching them across the carpet with each charge until Sherlock’s shoulder catches on the leg of his chair. John goes on fucking even as the chair scrapes and thuds, and the landlady’s broom handle bangs away from the flat below—soon enough she’ll be climbing the stairs and rapping it on their door, trilling out her nagging that she _doesn’t know what’s got into them lately, all this racket_.

Sherlock reels out a whine that ends in an urgent, distraught moan, and John is done for. His hips snap forward—Sherlock crumpled impossibly between John’s body and his chair and the floor—and John shouts out loud as he comes (she’s already complaining of the noise, fuck it), grinding his pelvis, his cock throbbing deep between the reddened mounds of Sherlock’s arse. Once the last pulse has surged through him, John withdraws—not gently—and staggers to his feet. Sherlock rolls to his side, facing his chair, practically underneath it, curls around himself and reaches down to finish himself. John thinks of kicking him, his long back carpet-burned where his t-shirt has ridden up, but lets it go. He tucks himself back into his trousers, goes to the kitchen for whisky and water.  Sherlock’s panting and huffing and—eventually—whimpering provides background noise as he pours.

*

 

Sherlock has let his phone’s battery run out; it lies silent and dead under the corner of his pillow. John’s fingertips are yellow and the television is always on. There is precious little left in the glass bottle and when the steri-packed syringes ran out, he picked needles out of the carpet, clinking them into a tea cup, and he poured whisky over them and John punched him repeatedly for stealing it—for wasting it. The landlady slides mail under the door but otherwise keeps to herself. John notices the cricket schedule on the TV screen and slurs, “Christ is that what day it is?”

They sleep side-by-side, not touching.

*

 

John scrawls a list, throws a dressing gown at Sherlock to cover his arms, and sends him downstairs begging aspirin, baking soda, flour, salt. Naturally, John has his pick of shot glasses to mix it in. He makes a paste, runs the hot tap, folds a dishrag into a compress. Sherlock’s eyes pour tears but he bears it. John washes and bandages the abscess. They don’t discuss it. Within a day, the abscess is gone, and Sherlock exercises good manners enough to offer John a blowjob, but despite his best efforts, John’s prick refuses to rise to the occasion. John punches a hole in the wall. Sherlock shoots up the last of the morphine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quotes in italics at the opening of each chapter are from "Smiler With Knife" by Morrissey.


	6. Breath Falls Away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains: Gunplay, non-consensual sex, prostitution, self-harm, graphic depictions of violence, IV drug use, suicide and MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH.

_When my last breath falls away  
Smiler, trust me when I say: "You'll be OK"_

_You'll be OK._

*

 

Once the paper squares start unfurling, they are everywhere: damp and crumpled in the kitchen sink, strewn along the mantel over the fire, crinkling beneath their naked bodies as they turn over in bed. The drapes are perpetually drawn; Sherlock and John are both wide awake at three a.m. and sleep through the bulk of the daylight. The floor of the bathtub is stained with skids of dried vomit and spatters of blood. Sherlock seems always to be bleeding—from the needlesticks or from his habit of self-mutilation by razor blade, scalpel, sewing needle—and John often stumbles or trips or slumps against furniture and walls, knocking plates off the edges of the worktops and leaning too hard against glass-fronted picture frames; now and then he even gets a wild hair to shave his face, but the razor is dull and his hands shake. Now and then one will swing a punch at the other but not much comes of it.

John implores Sherlock to shoot him up— _at this point, why not?_ —and Sherlock obliges. The rush is a warm flood of undiluted ecstasy better than his best-ever orgasm, better than ten, than ten thousand orgasms, no wonder his prick is instantly hard, thinking there must be a warm wet orifice on offer to incite such a riot of pleasure in every nerve, every molecule. Immediately in its wake settles an intense blanket of a feeling that Everything Is All Right, and he swoons backward, the thump of his head against the headboard more amusing than troublesome because Everything Is All Right. In the far distance, he can hear Sherlock chuckling, feels the slither of his own leather belt lick away from his arm as Sherlock fixes one up for himself.

*

 

Sherlock is shuddering with chills that clatter his teeth, and he rolls back to side to back again, legs drawn up in sudden spasms that make him moan and shout. He sweats a high, chemical stink from every pore. He weeps; snot bubbles from his nose. He becomes furious and punches the bathroom mirror, then curls in his chair and picks glass from between his fingers before sewing it shut, jumping and groaning at the pain.

There is a feeling in John’s back like two claw hammers dug in, one at each side of his spine, his kidneys struggling to keep up. It is late morning and he is flicking through the too-many-channels with the TV remote, slumped on the sofa with the bottle and a rocks glass on the coffee table by his raised, bare foot. Sherlock stalks the flat with his phone to his ear, gesturing hugely or worrying the lapel of the dressing gown hanging open over a pair of pyjama bottoms that ride low on his hips, two narrow loops of drawstring dangling in front of an enticing shift of shadow that makes John lick his lips.

“Just two hundred, then. You have my bank account numbers. You could wire it now and I’d have it in a few hours. I can get it back to you in a week or so. . .Don’t be tedious. . .I’m not answering that question. Will you send it or won’t you?. . .God you’re useless. . .Fuck off.”

Sherlock roundly hurls the phone and it skids across the top of his desk, comes to rest against the spine of a thick book that might be an old medical text.

“How much cash do you have?” Sherlock demands, and looks around the lounge floor as if he will find a wad of cash one of them forgot about—him a junkie, and John with no job.

“Fucking none I’d give you,” John replies, and presses the step-up button on the remote. Then again. Then again. “The fuck are you on about? You’ve got plenty of money. You’re a fucking. . .” John snorts a half-laugh even though nothing’s funny. “Posh arsehole. Those shoes. Don’t come asking me for money.”

Sherlock perches on the coffee table, makes a move to reach for John’s trousers pocket, looking for his billfold. “I. . .” he starts, and quicker and stronger than either of them expected, John catches Sherlock’s skinny wrist in the loop of his fist. He shakes his head. “I miscalculated how much I’d need,” Sherlock offers, and his eyes are wide and roadmapped with alarm-red capillaries. “It’s. . .I can’t get to it.”

John considers what Sherlock is saying. This man who so carelessly tossed his coins in the gutter rather than ruin the lines of his suit by pocketing it clearly must have plenty of money to spare.

“What, you spent all your money?”

“I didn’t spend it,” Sherlock says defensively. “I kept aside what I thought would keep me, and I put the rest in a trust. But I’m not the trustee; I don’t have access.”

“But you already spent all that you kept aside.”

“No.” Sherlock shivers hard, a sudden chill, then settles. John has released his wrist and he settles skeletal forearms on his knees. He shrugs with his long, needle-bruised hands. “I was robbed. I told you.”

“Oh, right.” John smirks and leans all the way back on the sofa, lets his head loll. “One of your hook-ups. I warned you about that.” He scratches his chin with the corner of the remote. “Why the fuck did you put all your money where you can’t even get to it? Call yourself a genius.”

“I _am_ a genius,” Sherlock protests indignantly. “I put it in a trust for those children. The ones you’ve been supporting.”

John clenches his jaw.

Sherlock waves his hand dismissively, cutting off John’s protest before he can even voice it. “Nevermind, it was easy. Your brother’s obituary had their names in it. Fifteen minutes on the internet and it was all arranged.”

“You have no right.” John is seething; Sherlock’s gall is limitless.

“I didn’t want my family to get it. It’s not insubstantial.”

“You _arrogant_ —“

Sherlock lurches to his feet, whirls and starts pacing again, shoving his hands backward through his hair. “I need some fucking _money_. I’m _sick_.”

John is still stuck on the unmitigated nerve of Sherlock Holmes, snooping into John’s personal life and. . .showing him up. John had put every cent he had away for those kids; undoubtedly Sherlock had outdone him with a few strokes of the computer keys. For children he didn’t care about, or even know. Just to prove his superiority. Just to _win_.

“Are you listening?” Sherlock shouts, and stomps his foot. “I need. Some fucking. _Money_.” He’s shaking head to foot, hands balled into fists, and his chest and neck and cheeks are flushed, every angle and plane of his face sheened with perspiration.

John shakes his head. Then a thought slowly rolls its way to the front of his mind, and he curls his lip, lets go a hollow laugh. “Guess there’s only one way to get it then.”

“What?” Sherlock demands, looking supremely annoyed, and beneath that, desperate. John picks up his phone, swipes and taps and holds it up and out.

“Time to sell your arse, gorgeous.”

Sherlock steps forward to squint at the screen. His profile on an escorting website—black and white, artsy photo of his neck and jaw and the tip of his nose, in profile; patently false biography laden with double entendre; and where his cell number used to be, red block letters spelling out NOT ACCEPTING NEW CLIENTS.

Sherlock rises to his full height and gathers a breath as if he might protest. He turns sideways, looks at the floor, and the breath sighs slowly out.

*

 

The client is late-middle-aged; taller than Sherlock and much broader, all shoulders; bland-faced, classic English upper class. Expensive shoes, camel coat, bearded in a professorial manner.

Sherlock has showered and shaved and arranged his hair. He has put on one of his shiny suits over a shinier shirt, and a pair of blindingly shiny shoes (but no socks). His after shave smells like incense and the only visible marks are a fresh, dark purple bruise on the back of one hand, from the needles, and a faded yellow one on the edge of his jaw, from John’s fist. John has fed him a handful of painkillers he’d been holding back for no other reason than that watching Sherlock shoot up was more arousing to him than watching him snort crushed pills. Sherlock’s shivering has quieted, and his skin is neither over-pale nor florid. Every now and then he reaches for the side of his thigh or his tricep, works the tips of his fingers hard into the cramping muscles.

 John refuses to move from his seat at the kitchen table, where he is perusing porn on his laptop; the client is clearly thrown by his presence. Sherlock dismissively explains that he’s only there for security, to keep them both safe (translation: he’s here to assure you don’t murder me). The client nods, still visibly uncomfortable, and won’t meet John’s gaze.

“Fuck’im good.” John raises his glass in a vague toast, as Sherlock motions the client toward the bedroom, then follows him. He lets the door stand open a few inches, so John can listen: for the sex or for trouble, John isn’t sure.

“It’s good to see you again, sweetheart,” John hears the client say. “But I feel compelled to mention that you don’t look well; are you quite all right?” _Jeezus, another posh arsehole_.

“Just—ah—getting over something,” Sherlock replies, and his voice is so different it takes John by surprise. He sounds meek and surrendered; the aural equivalent of rolling over to offer his belly. “What can I do for you?” he asks, and John finds himself leaning back in the chair, straining to hear.

“We used to have such lovely times together; I always enjoyed your company,” the client says.

“Thank you.”

“On your knees I think,” the client says. There is a lengthy pause—kissing? beginning to undress? handing over a fistful of cash?—and then the client’s voice has changed—harsh, a half-step louder than it was—as he says. “I’ve missed making you cry.”

“Yes, sir,” Sherlock murmurs, and John has just fucking _got_ to see this. He pushes his chair back—some brittle-voiced American girl on his computer screen is getting it brutally from both ends, tits bouncing harshly—and moves to stand just outside Sherlock’s slightly-open door.

All he can see of the client is his profile, the trousers tugged down on his thighs, pricey leather belt hanging loose from the loops, and Sherlock turned slightly more toward the doorway, kneeling. His jacket is off and his shirt is unbuttoned all the way to his waist, still tucked in but pulled open to bare a swath of his skinny chest. The angle is such that John can’t see the client’s prick, and when Sherlock’s face drifts forward, John loses most of him behind the client’s hip.

The client grabs Sherlock by the hair at the back of his head, and yanks him back, shoves him forward, and John half-grins to see it, nearly just the way he would do it. Sherlock’s eyes are closed, and John presses the door gingerly with the backs of two fingers, opening it a bit wider and shifting his stance to get a better view. Sherlock moans, gags slightly, braces himself with hands on the client’s thighs.

“Good lad, swallow it down,” the client urges, and now John can see he’s got his other hand curved around Sherlock’s chin, fucking his mouth relentlessly. There are glittering trails of tears sliding from the corner of Sherlock’s eyes, and his face is going pink with held breath. The client’s pelvis thrusts forward hard, and stays there, holding Sherlock’s head tight between his hands, and Sherlock struggles a bit, pushing hard on the client’s thighs, cheeks and neck darkening to red, throat visibly straining, eyes looking blackened, bruised. Something in John’s gut twists and burns, and it is not because of the drink.

Sherlock’s long fingers are scrabbling wildly against the client’s thigh, and at last the grip is released and Sherlock comes away sucking air, weeping, choking. He isn’t given two seconds to steady himself before the client’s got him by the hair again, fisting his cock to shove it back into Sherlock’s mouth. John can see plainly Sherlock trying to turn his head to the side, angling for a few more breaths, and his tongue is in every wrong place, protesting the invasion of the client’s prick into his mouth. Sherlock gags, but the client just rocks forward, partway back, deeply forward again, and holds him there, and pulls him closer, and half-circles his hips, then again, and again. Sherlock’s fingers are digging hard at his thigh.

“Behave yourself, bitch,” the client scolds, and Sherlock stills his hands, but there is a weird juttering of his shoulders, and the client uses the fistful of Sherlock’s wavy hair to jerk his head up and back, up and back, and Sherlock’s throat gurgles and saliva drizzles out the corner of his mouth down his chin. His cheeks are dark pink, his stretched lips edged in white.

The client lets him go once more, and Sherlock all but vomits, he is gagging so hard, gasping for breath. Suddenly, a loud, thudding smack as the back of the client’s hand lands on Sherlock’s cheek, swipes his head to the side, then the flat of his palm answers the blow, swinging back the other way to slap Sherlock with a loud, echoing crack that splits the air. The hand in the hair, Sherlock’s eyes full of tears, and the client is fucking his mouth again—furious and deep—and Sherlock’s hands are braced against his thigh, pushing hard, trying to free himself. The client ignores it and carries on, white-knuckled hands wrapped hard around Sherlock’s head, maneuvering him with great force.

Sherlock taps out. Three quick pats on the outside of the client’s thigh, but he doesn’t stop, as if he hasn’t noticed, or doesn’t care. Sherlock taps again, and John can see the muscles of his jaw straining as he tries to pull his head back. He’s tapped out, surrendered, admitted defeat; it should be over. The client is merciless and Sherlock’s wet eyes fly open, his gaze unfocused, darting, wild.

John feels almost sober as he steadily climbs the stairs, goes into the bedside table’s drawer, checks that all is as it should be, goes back down. He shoves open the door and levels his gun at the client’s head.

“We’re done here,” he says. The client’s face is stupid, mouth hanging open, cartoonish. Sherlock falls away, braces himself with palms flat on the floor, turns his head and dry-heaves between deep pulls of fresh air he is desperate for. John jerks his head, indicating. “Pull your trousers up.” He is surprised how steady his grip is.

The client raises his hands momentarily, then goes for his trousers, yanks them up, tucks in his flagging prick.

“How much?” John demands, then instantly, louder, “ _Sweetheart_ , how much?” Using the client’s endearment just in case the pistol is not enough indication of who is Top Man in the current scenario.

Sherlock’s voice is hoarse and tear-choked. “Eighty.”

John barks out a laugh. “ _What?!_ Fuck no.” He shifts his gaze back to the client, who stands there shaking, looking terrified, baffled. “How much do you have? Time to empty the wallet.” He extends his opposite hand, palm upturned. “Come on, mate—he’s worth it.”

The client scrambles in his trousers’ back pockets until he comes up with a leather wallet, unfolds it and pulls out a sheaf of notes. He leans forward just far enough to put them into John’s hand; his own fingers are trembling. John fans the stack, registers about three hundred, makes a face that indicates it’s only barely acceptable.

“What else? The watch?”

Sherlock, now sitting on the floor with one leg extended and his elbow resting on his raised knee, breath settling, swiping his spit-slicked chin on the sleeve of his shirt, mutters, “It’s fake.”

The client snaps an angry glance at Sherlock.

“Oi, eyes here,” John demands.

“The watch is counterfeit,” Sherlock clarifies.

“The ring, then,” John demands.

“My wedding ring?” the client protests. “No. What would I tell--?”

“Tell her the truth,” John intones, sneering half-smile creeping across his face. “Your old friend the gay junkie prostitute took all your money, and a drunken war veteran threatened to shoot you if you didn’t give up your wedding ring.” John snorts. “She’ll have no choice but to believe you.”

The client looks vaguely furious, but removes the ring and throws it at Sherlock, who somehow snatches it out of midair.

“Good,” John says, and there is a silent few seconds before he says. “Now cry.”

The client sputters. “Wh-what?”

“ _Fucking **cry**_!” John shouts, spit flying. His rage is rising; soon he will not be able to think, or even to see. “Cry, you piece of shit. I want to see you _cry_.”

“It’s enough,” Sherlock says then, low-volume monotone.

“No,” John counters. The client looks bewildered, lowers his gaze to the barrel of the gun.

“It’s enough, nevermind it,” Sherlock repeats, and starts to get to his feet, smoothes his open shirt front, pockets the ring.

“Is that even loaded?” The client demands, full of sudden bravado.

John shifts his grip, raises his aim a few inches. “One way to find out.”

The client crosses his arms in front of his face, cowering, and Sherlock steps forward, gripping John’s opposite arm. “Nevermind it,” he repeats, leaning close to John’s ear, pressing himself close against John’s side so John can feel the hard length of Sherlock’s prick against this hip. “It’s over.”

John narrows his eyes at the client, waits a beat, lowers the pistol to his side.

“Out,” Sherlock commands, and the client hustles past them, barely slowing to grab his expensive coat off the hall tree as he goes.

Sherlock nuzzles up against the side of John’s face, opens his mouth against John’s neck, and John huffs a quick sigh, and lets him.

“ _Stupid_ , Doctor Watson,” Sherlock scold-whispers, and his long fingers go for the front of John’s trousers.

“Fuck it.”

Sherlock steps around so they are chest to chest, and John leans back against the open door, tucks the fistful of cash into the breast pocket of Sherlock’s shirt. Sherlock works John’s fly with one hand, and the other hand slides down John’s arm to slip long fingers around the hand holding the gun, then lower, to surround its cool, rectangular barrel. Sherlock kisses him—deep, urgent—and John turns his wrist, shifting so that Sherlock’s fingers entangle with his around the grip of the gun. Sherlock’s tongue licks John’s tongue, and he whines high in his throat, then bites John’s lower lip. He raises his palm, spits into it, takes John’s prick in hand, and begins to stroke, his own pelvis rocking sympathetically.

John gives in to it, high stakes making him harder than he’s been able to get in far longer than he cares to think about, Sherlock’s grateful mouth and hands on the move, his long body pressing hard into John’s body at thigh and hip and chest and neck. Then Sherlock’s free hand wraps around his, and persuades John to raise the pistol upward, beside Sherlock’s ribs, then higher, resting on his shoulder, then higher still, and Sherlock turns his face to press his cheek against the muzzle.

Every instinct tells John to protest and pull away— _the fuck are you doing, you goddamn idiot_ —but he tamps it down. He moves his finger away from the trigger, but pushes the gun tight against Sherlock’s cheek, feels the ridges of Sherlock’s teeth above and below as he presses hard into pliant skin. Sherlock lets out a quivering moan, and slides his fist harder, tighter, around John’s dripping cock. John draws in a sharp gasp and smacks his head backward against the bedroom door, rattling it against the wall.

Sherlock’s entire body is rolling and thrusting against John now, following the motion of his twisting wrist. John turns the gun so the flat, cool side of the barrel mashes against Sherlock’s cheekbone, then up toward his hairline, and then he rotates it (just _there_ , at his temple; John knows very well how this feels) but of course he’s not going to shoot him, this is fucking insanity, they are both out of their fucking minds, god when will it end, someone just end this already.

“Fuck!” John mutters, and rocks forward into Sherlock’s spit-slicked fingers. Sherlock lets go a moan like he is dying, and his shoulder shoves violently against John’s, again, and then again, rocking them both hard against the door.

“Please,” Sherlock pleads, and leans into it. “ _Fuck_. . . Yes. . . _Please_.”

John pretends it means something else, minds the placement of his fingers, seeks Sherlock’s tongue with his own, kisses him hard, open-mouthed, wet and messy, fucks his cock up into Sherlock’s bony hand.

“ _Please_ ,” Sherlock begs, and his voice shatters around it, and his whole, thrusting body shivers crazily for a long moment, then softens, leaning weightily onto John’s chest. John lets the pistol fall away, down by his hip, grabs Sherlock behind the neck with his other hand, rocks up, and up, and up, and when he comes it spurts up onto Sherlock’s belly, thoroughly ruins the pricey shirt. John groans, presses his teeth against Sherlock’s jaw, rakes them down his throat.

“Why didn’t you--?” Sherlock starts, and John shoves him away with one hand, sends him stumbling backward toward the bed.

“There now,” John snarls as he goes. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

Back upstairs in his unused bedroom, John sits on the bed with the gun to his head but his hand shakes and his shoulders heave with silent weeping and in the end—as ever—it’s just _too hard_.

*

 

He cooks the heroin in the same silver spoon he used to use to crush the pills. Heavy brass cigarette lighter with an engraved monogram (not his) he eventually trades for a syringe, draws up every drop, pulls and pushes the plunger, flicks the needle. The spoon falls to the floor, he winds and pulls and bites the belt, _fuck_ his veins are wrecked, sometimes switches to the other arm, or his ankle, soon it will have to be his neck, _smack-smack-smacks_ the spot, pinches and teases the vein to the surface of his skin, lines it up, pushes, pushes, inhales. . .

*

 

Sherlock has littered the contents of his desk onto the floor, pulled the drawers out and upended them, moved the lamp and the chair and the legs of the desk and the edges of the drapes where they puddle on the floor, pulled up the edge of the rug.

“There are more, there are more, there are more. . .”

“There aren’t any fucking _more_!” John roars at him, every last nerve frayed from Sherlock’s jittery, hours-long, obsessive search of the flat for folded paper squares of heroin that he is not going to find. John is so. fucking. tired. He tries to settle himself on the sofa, but his gut is swollen and there is a burning, spiraling pain in his side that flares and fades (mostly flares), and he cannot get comfortable lying down and so must sit, half-reclining, with a throw pillow tucked behind his neck. His feet go numb, his legs cramp, he can’t keep still, can’t get comfortable, and all he wants to do is fucking sleep.

Sherlock lifts the hem of his crusty t-shirt to wipe the snot perpetually dribbling from his nose. He chin quivers.

“No,” he argues, not really to John. “There have to be more.”

“You fucking shot it all up, gorgeous. It’s gone.”

Sherlock looms over John, palm extended. “Money.”

John slaps his hand away. “I haven’t got any money.”

“You held out on me,” Sherlock blathers, “The client. How much did he give you? You kept some.”

“Fuck off.”

“Give me the rest of that fucking money,” Sherlock demands, and his face is white as a sheet and his arms are covered with gooseflesh.

John gets to his feet, sways, steadies himself. “I’ll get you a drink. You’re going to have to ride this one out, gorgeous. Tomorrow we’ll clean you up and you can go sell it on a corner somewhere.” John plods toward the kitchen, the bottle half-empty on the table amid a litter of sharp implements and a pile of unopened mail. “Or—what’d you tell me?—train station mens’ room.”

Sherlock is on him then, giant hands slamming down on his shoulders, a knee slamming up against the back of his leg, and John goes down in a heap, shouting at the agony the sudden movement wreaks on his belly. He rolls, struggling to find purchase, or get to his feet, get some leverage—Sherlock in this state fights like a child, fights dirty, and he is fucking enormous and his arms and legs are each a mile long and they move faster than John’s whisky-soaked brain can process. He must get up, get over, get a few jabs in and settle Sherlock down.

But no, it can’t be done. John manages to turn, but Sherlock’s body is a weighted cage and John is trapped, his arms pinned under Sherlock’s knees with the weight of him straddling John’s chest, and those ridiculous hands close tight—and now tighter—around John’s throat.

Well, this was a fucking turn up. Sherlock Holmes was killing him.

*

 

John’s eyes blink open and the first thing he can focus upon is the closed, locked door to the landing. There are noises in the kitchen, Sherlock touching everything, tilting it, shaking it, shoving it aside, pulling out the drawers, yanking open the cupboards. John swallows and the pain of it makes him want to scream. He rolls his neck and sees the sofa is pulled out from the wall; the coffee table on its side. Sherlock is muttering, sniffling, groaning his despair as he stalks the kitchen. Glass shatters in the sink. There is a sound of metal hitting wood, and long bare feet slapping and sticking to the floor.

John rolls onto his side, determined to rise, and lets out a low moan; everything hurts.

All motion in the kitchen suddenly stops and the flat is silent. Then, four stomping strides and here are Sherlock’s feet planted beside John’s head where it hangs between his shoulders as he gets to hands and knees, pressing himself up but it is far from easy—he was sure he was dead—and he raises his gaze to find Sherlock looking positively crazed, face red, eyes darting madly, snot running from his nose and blood oozing from a cut on his jaw. He has John’s gun, pointed shakily at John’s face.

“Help me look.”

John lets out a moan. “There’s nothing to find.” He is on his feet, and moving away from Sherlock, toward the kitchen, ignoring the gun. Let him. He won’t.

“You have to help me!” Sherlock whines, and braces his shaking wrist with his opposite hand; it’s heavier than Sherlock had imagined it would be, John can tell.

John grabs the bottle, raises it to his lips, is repelled but powers through, swallows hard. A bit dribbles down his chin and he swipes at it with his fingers.

“I’m sick. I can’t.” Sherlock lowers the gun, it hangs weirdly in his grasp. He hiccups a dry sob. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Nearly there, gorgeous,” John reassures. Sherlock’s shoulders are rounded, his head hangs forward. He shudders violently, a sudden chill.

John passes him on his way back to the sofa, and when John’s hand reaches for it, Sherlock surrenders the gun to him with no complaint, no resistance. John rights the coffee table with a grunt at the effort, sets the gun down on it, aiming toward the locked door.

“Help me,” Sherlock implores, the quiet monotone this time.

John shoves the sofa back into place with his knee against the front edge.

“I can’t get you anything else; I’m not a doctor anymore.” John says, matter-of-fact though he feels the room tilting beneath his feet. “And my money’s gone. Have a drink. It might help.”

Sherlock lets out a long, low moan at this, and lurches into the kitchen, and there is more frantic shuffling and rifling and picking up and dropping. John leans to half-sit on the edge of the desk, takes another deep pull of the whisky. The skin of his hand and forearm is yellow—no longer just at the tips of his fingers. When he looks away from the jaundice and the bottle to refocus toward the kitchen, what he sees is Sherlock, standing on the threshold between the lounge and the kitchen, long and skinny and moon-white, but near the side of his waist there is a blossom of red, blooming and cascading.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” John mutters, just above the level of his breath, and his heart races and he is hot all over. “What did you _do_?” Then he sees the long, wide knife in Sherlock’s hand, suspended there in midair, drifting in the grip of those impossible fingers. Sherlock takes a long step forward, collapses like a ragdoll.

The air smells of metal, salt, and a particular kind of rot. John kneels beside him, lifts his shirt.

“It’s not so bad,” he pronounces, because it isn’t, though the smell makes John think he’s probably nicked his colon. “It doesn’t have to be—“

Sherlock suddenly flings out his arm, his fingers scrabble for the pistol, and John catches his wrist before he can take aim at either of them. Sherlock manages to fire it, and the boom is deafening, startles them both. Sherlock is determined, and still shockingly strong. John yanks his hair, then punches his face—aims square at the middle—nearly lands it. Familiar, clattering footsteps scurry up the stairs, and she pounds with the side of her fist on the locked door.

“What was that? Are you boys all right?” She tries the knob. “Sherlock, open the door!”

John peels the gun out of his hand, slides it onto the floor, nudges it just out of reach with his foot. It is warm against the bare sole of his foot.

“Go away!” John shouts, and in that precise second Sherlock folds himself away from the gun, and in a flash he jabs the knife in again. He lets out a low, _oof_ , like he does when he’s been punched. John feels his own eyes widening with shock.

“Boys! Open this door or I’m calling the police.”

“See, now, she’s going to get that boyfriend of yours after you,” John scolds him and Sherlock moans, his face turning pale. He sobs, and it wracks him, and he braces himself against the floor with one flat palm, head hanging, breath laboured.

John leans his back against the overstuffed red armchair he thinks of as his, grips Sherlock above the elbows and drags him closer, god he is so heavy. There is so much blood; the bottom half of Sherlock’s t-shirt is soaked to dripping, his pyjama bottoms sodden nearly to his knees.

More banging at the door.

Sherlock unfurls a long, “ _owwww. ._ .” and his face clenches. John gets him up higher, pulls Sherlock’s head down onto his chest. Sherlock’s arms hang limply and his eyes are slow-motion fluttering, mostly closed, then flying open, then drifting shut again.

“Be still,” John cautions, as if it matters, there’s no way to stop it now even if they wanted to. John’s instincts are kicking in, his brain ringing alarms that he ought to be shouting orders—gauze and O-negative and sutures, right away, he’s going to go septic, he’s going to bleed out—but it’s pointless; it’s already done. Sherlock’s face crumples. He looks vaguely surprised, like maybe it hurts more than Sherlock had thought it would. Or possibly it hurts less.

“I’m calling the police!”

“Then fucking call them!” John shouts, and the delicate feet retreat quickly down the stairs. Sherlock’s eyes are full, and the beads of his tears shimmer there at the edges a moment before they fall. John wraps his arm tight around Sherlock’s back, his upper arm, presses his mouth and nose against Sherlock’s forehead.

“ _Shh_ ,” John soothes, and kisses him quickly. _At this point, why not?_ “ _Shh_ , there, there now. Poor thing.” Sherlock softens against him, gasps for breath. “Poor darling,” John says, and his eyes are burning. “It’s all right now. You did your best, but it was just too hard. You deserved better.”

Sherlock sighs; John feels the long expulsion of damp breath against his chest through his shirt. “I’m sorry it hurt you so much. _Shhh. ._.” John is shocked to taste salt in the corners of his mouth. “There, there.” He shifts a bit, tries to draw Sherlock closer. “I’ve got you. Got you now.”

Sherlock is impossibly still, and John listens to his breathing, shallow and reedy through dry, parted lips. There are sirens crying in the distance, growing closer.

“Nothing to worry for,” John murmurs, pushing his voice up past a thickening in his throat. “You were brilliant.”

A shudder wracks him. Sherlock’s body is so heavy across his swollen, aching gut. The sirens are right outside now, he’s sure, and here’s proof, heavy footsteps thundering toward them. Pounding on the doors.

“Sherlock! Open up, it’s me!”

The cop-boyfriend, of course, John wants to laugh except that he is crying. He leans, Sherlock slips a bit lower against his chest, and John reaches, and thinks of pressing his fingers to Sherlock’s neck but he knows what he will feel there, which is nothing, because he exhaled—

“Sherlock! We’re breaking it down!. . . _Now, go_!”

\--and that was the last of it, didn’t inhale again, and John stretches his palm and his fingertips to pull it closer, catches it, grips it tight with, _yes_ , still-shaking hands, and there is an enormous thud against the door, a sharp cracking sound of wood splintering and giving way, and he presses the muzzle to his temple and curls his finger around the trigger and

_It was easy._

 

-END-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Italicized quotes opening each chapter are from "Smiler With Knife" by Morrissey
> 
> I have greatly enjoyed writing the fight!lock stories in the Bleed So Pretty series, for many different reasons and in many different ways. It has been fun, sexy, challenging, and heartbreaking. I appreciate so very much the encouraging feedback and the positive comments along the way. I know it has not always been a fun ride, but I am grateful for the support of the Lovely Readers as I did what I must. Many thank yous for spending time with the stories.


End file.
